EXCHANGE 


NOV 


1Ilni\>erstt$  of  Gbfcaao 

FOUNDED  BY  JOHN  D.  ROCKEFELLER 


THE  REACTION  AGAINST  META 
PHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 


A  DISSERTATION 
SUBMITTED    TO    THE    FACULTY     OF     THE     GRADUATE     SCHOOL     OF     ARTS 

AND  LITERATURE  IN  CANDIDACY  FOR  THE  DEGREE 
OF  DOCTOR  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

(DEPARTMENT  OF  SYSTEMATIC  THEOLOGY) 


BY 
DOUGLAS  CLYDE  MACINTOSH 


CHICAGO 

1911 


THniverstts  ot  Cbtcago 

FOUNDED  BY  JOHN  D.  ROCKEFELLER 


THE  REACTION  AGAINST  META- 
PHYSICS IN  THEOLOGY 


A  DISSERTATION 

SUBMITTED    TO    THE    FACULTY     OF     THE     GRADUATE     SCHOOL     OF     ARTS 

AND    LITERATURE    IN    CANDIDACY    FOR    THE    DEGREE 

OF  DOCTOR  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


(DEPARTMENT  OF  SYSTEMATIC  THEOLOGY) 


BY 

DOUGLAS  CLYDE  MACINTOSH 
\\ 


CHICAGO 

1911 


AUTHOR'S  NOTE 

This  dissertation  is  the  first  part  of  an  essay  upon  Theology  and 
Metaphysics  to  be  treated  under  the  following  four  heads: 

1.  The  Reaction  against  Metaphysics  in  Theology 

2.  The  Reaction  against  Theology  in  Metaphysics 

3.  The  Function  of  Theology  in  Metaphysics 

4.  The  Function  of  Metaphysics  in  Theology 


ANALYSIS  OF  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTION .       .       i 

1.  Theology 

2.  Metaphysics 

PART  1.^  THE  NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  AGAINST 
METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY .      .       .8 

3.  In  Non-Christian  Religions 

4.  In  the  New  Testament 

5.  In  the  Ancient  Catholic  Church 

6.  In  the  Roman  Catholic  Church 

7.  In  the  Older  Protestantism 

8.  In  Religious  Romanticism 

9.  In  the  Ritschlian  Movement 

10.  In  Positivism 

11.  In  Pragmatism 

PART  II.    CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF    THE  ANTI-METAPHYSICAL 
REACTION 57 

12.  As  Seen  in  the  Early  Church 

13.  As  Seen  in  the  "Double-Truth"  Theory  of  Later  Catholicism 
and  Early  Protestantism 

14.  As  Seen  in  Kantianism  and  Its  More  Immediate  Consequences 

15.  As  Seen  in  Ritschlianism 

1 6.  As  Seen  in  Pragmatism 


INTRODUCTION 

i.  Theology  is  the  systematic  expression  of  religious  conviction, 
i.e.,  of  belief  with  regard  to  the  nature  and  activity  of  the  deity,  more 
particularly  in  so  far  as  these  are  related  to  the  vital  interests  of  men. 

In  modern  Protestant  theology  there  are,  in  general,  two  methods, 
the  conservative  and  the  radical.1  The  former  emphasizes  objectivity 
as  opposed  to  the  merely  subjective.  The  latter  stands  for  internality 
as  distinct  from  all  that  remains  external.3  But  this  distinction  seems 
bound  to  disappear.  The  conservative  is  seeing  ever  more  clearly  the 
necessity  of  inner  assurance;  the  radical,  the  importance  of  objective 
validity. 

Conservatism  in  its  original  form  recognized  no  distinction  between 
biblical  and  systematic  theology.  All  biblical  statements,  literally 
or  allegorically  interpreted,  were  suppposed  to  form,  without  further 
criticism,  the  content  of  Christian  theology,  which  everyone  was  in 
duty  bound  to  accept.  As  a  matter  of  fact  theologians  usually  made 
a  selection  of  such  texts  as  appealed  to  them  most  strongly,  and  made 
them  determining,  not  only  for  theological  construction,  but  also  for 
the  interpretation  of  all  other  Scripture  passages.  The  necessity  of 
allegorical  and  other  arbitrary  and  unscientific  methods  of  exegesis  was 
transcended  when  once  there  was  frankly  recognized  the  distinction 
between  a  purely  historical  and  a  constructive  or  normative  science — 
a  distinction  which  was  already  implicit  in  Luther's  critical  evaluation 
of  scriptural  books  according  to  the  norm  of  the  gospel.  The  differ- 
ence between  the  two  disciplines  in  question  was  originally  felt  to  be, 
however,  not  so  much  a  difference  of  form  as  of  content.  There  were 

1  It  should  be  noted  that  the  conservative  method  may  be  retained  even  when 
the  content  of  the  theology  is  radical,  e.g.,  in  Socinianism;   while  even  one  who  is 
conservative  as  to  content  of  his  theology  may  dare  to  employ  the  radical  method. 
In  this  section  the  terms  "conservatism,"  "conservative  theology,"  "conservative 
theologian,"  and  their  antitheses,  where  used  without  further  qualification,  do  not 
refer  to  content,  but  to  method. 

2  The  term  "objective"  is  here  applied  to  that  which  is  sufficiently  confirmed  or 
verified  to  be  regarded  as  real  and  true.     By  "subjective"  is  meant  that  which  is 
doubtful,  because  it  is  the  unverified  opinion  of  the  subject.     That  is  "internal" 
which  has  its  evidence  within  one's  own  experience  and  thought,  while  that  is  "exter- 
nal" which  has  its  evidence  only  in  the  experience  and  thought  of  another,  if  at  all. 
The  union  of  objectivity  with  internality  is  the  desideratum. 

i 


2       •'*"  :  INACTION1  A-GAlitfST.  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 


elements  in  the  Bible  that  seemed  to  resist  the  unifying  efforts  of  the 
system-builder,  and  this  became  one  of  the  chief  factors  in  making  the 
transition  from  the  biblical  to  the  systematic  fundamentally  a  process 
of  subtraction  of  refractory  and  unassimilable  elements.1  At  first  the 
endeavor  was  made  to  confine  this  elimination  to  certain  phases  of  Old 
Testament  thought.  But  once  the  subtraction  principle  was  admitted, 
it  soon  assumed  a  more  radical  form,  and  was  applied  to  all  that  could 
not  readily  be  harmonized  with  what  one  felt  compelled  to  believe 
on  other  than  biblical  grounds.  Some  felt  free  to  apply  the  principle 
to  all  biblical  materials  save  the  recorded  teachings  of  Jesus;  others 
now  give  it  application  here  also,  assuming,  however,  that  the  parts 
pruned  away  do  not  represent  the  thought  of  Jesus  but  a  misinterpre- 
tation of  his  teaching  on  the  part  of  the  primitive  church;  while  still 
others  —  and  here  we  have  the  conservative  method  in  its  most  radical 
form  —  declare  that  even  in  what  we  must  in  fairness  regard  as  quite 
probably  the  thought  and  teaching  of  Jesus  there  are  elements  which 
cannot  find  a  place  in  the  systematic  theology  of  the  modern  Christian. 

Still,  even  in  its  most  radical  form,  this  method  intends  to  be  con- 
servative. It  is  generally  considered  "safe,"  as  providing,  supposedly, 
for  the  retention  of  all  the  elements  of  permanent  value  in  primitive 
Christian  belief.  It  thus  has  obvious  advantages  for  the  preacher. 
But,  on  the  other  hand,  this  gain  in  point  of  content  would  seem  to  be 
offset  by  a  weakness  with  respect  to  certainty.  How  can  the  theologian 
know  that  he  has  not  retained  elements  which  may  yet  have  to  be  elim- 
inated? So  far  as  his  methodological  principle  is  concerned,  no  dis- 
tinction is  made  between  what  is  either  essential  to  faith  or  verifiable 
in  some  way,  on  the  one  hand,  and  that  which,  on  the  other  hand,  has 
simply  not  yet  been  proven  unbelievable.  As  regards  certainty,  the 
former  is  reduced  to  the  level  of  the  latter. 

The  radical  method  is  interested  above  all  else  in  certainty.  Reject- 
ing all  purely  external  authority,  it  seeks  to  set  forth  the  religious  con- 
victions which  have  grown  up  out  of  the  theologian's  own  experience 
and  reflection.  To  those  who  pursue  the  conservative  method,  this 
other  seems  compelled  to  oscillate  between  a  negative  position  and  purely 
individual  opinion  in  questions  of  religion.  Of  the  method  in  its  most 

1  Parallel  with  the  elimination  of  certain  phases  of  biblical  thought,  there  goes 
on  a  process  of  addition  of  certain  elements  from  modern  thought;  but  so  long  as 
the  method  remains  in  principle  conservative,  this  addition  is  incidental,  and,  in  the 
more  conservative  forms,  unconscious.  It  is  the  necessity  for  subtraction  that  is  a 
matter  of  concern  to  the  theologian  himself,  and  significant  for  our  present  purpose. 


INTRODUCTION  3 

radical  form  this  is  doubtless  largely  true;  but  it  is  possible,  even  for 
the  one  who  has  adopted  this  radical  principle,  to  enrich  the  positive 
content  of  his  system  not  only  without  a  loss  of  inner  certainty,  but  even 
with  a  decided  gain  in  objective  validity.  It  is  perhaps  the  chief  merit 
of  Ritschlianism  that  it  has  led  the  radical  theology  in  this  conservative 
direction.  It  has  pointed  out  how  the  individual  can,  certainly  without 
the  loss  of  individual  autonomy,  respond  to  the  ethico-religious  appeal 
of  the  Christian  gospel,  and  can  appropriate  to  himself,  through  experi- 
ence and  reflection,  those  values  which  are  cherished  in  the  Christian 
community,  and  of  which  the  New  Testament  Scriptures  are  the  most 
original  available  expression.  Thus  directed,  the  radical  theology 
moves  by  a  process  of  addition  toward  a  position  ever  more  fully  Chris- 
tian in  content,  and  this  with  a  positive  gain  rather  than  loss  with 
respect  to  certainty.  The  religious  faith  of  the  individual  becomes, 
psychologically  speaking,  more  certain  and  objective  by  being  known 
to  £>e  essentially  Christian. 

But  theology  based  upon  this  radical  principle  must  be  greatly 
enriched  by  a  critical  but  sympathetic  study  of  the  most  significant 
expressions  of  the  Christian  faith  (notably  the  New  Testament),  if  it 
is  to  compare  favorably,  so  far  as  content  is  concerned,  with  the  type 
of  theology  previously  described.  The  question  is  constantly  pertinent 
as  to  whether  full  justice  has  been  done  to  the  content  of  the  gospel. 
Theoretically  the  two  types  of  theology,  the  conservative  type  modified 
by  the  principle  of  subtraction,  and  the  radical  type  modified  by  its 
principle  of  addition,  should  ultimately  coincide  as  to  content.1  But, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  there  seem  always  to  remain  certain  elements  of 
biblical  and  ecclesiastical  doctrine  which  the  conservative  method  cannot 
exclude  and  the  radical  method  cannot  include,  so  long  as  the  theology, 
whether  conservative  or  radical,  remains  merely  dogmatic  and  non- 
philosophical.  Consequently,  when  the  two  types  of  theology  are 
brought  into  contact  with  each  other,  this  residual  content  becomes 
problematic  for  both;  and,  in  the  case  of  the  conservative  theologian, 
a  measure  of  uncertainty  tends  to  arise  with  respect  to  the  entire  content 
of  his  system,  simply  because  he  has  not  from  the  beginning  made 
certainty  a  primary  consideration. 

2.  Before  proceeding   to  investigate   the  reaction   against   meta- 

1  The  essential  content  in  both  is  in  a  sense  the  same,  for  the'  conservative  method 
starts  from  the  classic  expression  (in  the  New  Testament)  of  the  Christian  faith  and 
experience,  while  the  radical  starts  by  expressing  the  faith  and  experience  which  have 
resulted  from  one's  own  response  to  the  religio-ethical  appeal  of  Jesus. 


4  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

physics  in  theology,1  it  will  be  well  to  seek  some  definition  of  the  nature 
and  sphere  of  metaphysics  in  general. 

As  a  preliminary  definition  it  may  be  said  that  metaphysics  is  the 
theory  or  science  of  reality.  Mere  dogmatic  statements  or  bare  practi- 
cal postulates  with  regard  to  the  nature  of  reality  do  not  properly  come 
within  the  category  of  the  metaphysical.  It  is  not  always  true,  let  us 
hope,  that  metaphysics  is,  as  Bradley  facetiously  puts  it,  "the  finding 
of  bad  reasons  for  what  we  believe  upon  instinct,"2  but  it  certainly  aims 
to  be  a  finding  of  reasons;  it  is  fundamentally  an  intellectual  or  truth- 
seeking  process.  In  the  words  of  Professor  James,  it  is  "an  unusually 
obstinate  attempt  to  think  clearly  and  consistently."3  This  is  not  a 
complete  definition,  but  it  is  true  as  far  as  it  goes.  It  remains  to  be 
emphasized  that  it  is  with  the  nature  of  reality  that  metaphysics  is 
concerned.  This  was  the  original  application  of  the  term.  Since 
Kant,  however,  the  term  has  frequently  been  used  to  designate  the 
theory  of  knowledge  as  well.  This  has  its  explanation  in  the  fact  that 
the  problem  as  to  the  possibility  of  knowing  reality  has  developed 
naturally  out  of  the  problem  as  to  the  nature  of  reality.  But  in  the 
interest  of  clearness  it  is  better  to  confine  the  term  metaphysics  to  its 
narrower  signification  of  the  theory  of  reality,  or,  as  Kiilpe  expresses  it, 
"the  elaboration  of  a  theory  of  the  universe."4 

The  divisions  of  metaphysics  correspond  to  the  divisions  of  reality. 
In  the  Wolffian  philosophy,  which  was  the  heir  of  Aristotle  and  all  the 
centuries  of  scholasticism,  metaphysics  was  subdivided  into  a  general 
part  called  ontology,  and  three  special  parts,  viz.,  rational  cosmology, 
rational  psychology,  and  rational  theology.  Under  the  changed  point 
of  view  introduced  by  the  Kantian  philosophy,  ontology,  i.e.,  the  theory 
of  being  or  reality  in  general,  was  developed  into  epistemology,  or  the 
science  of  the  categories  by  which  reality  is  known,  or  rather  by  which 
the  reality  to  be  known  is  constructed  in  being  known.  This  is  the 
only  metaphysics  recognized  as  legitimate  by  the  Kantian  philosophy. 
The  three  special  parts-  of  metaphysics  were  criticized  and  rejected  as 
pseudo-sciences.  In  Lotze  we  find  a  return  to  constructive  metaphysics, 
which  is  divided  into  ontology,  cosmology,  and  psychology,  while  the 
missing  part,  theology,  reappears  in  the  philosophy  of  religion.  But 
it  is  probably  truer  to  the  fundamental  interests  of  metaphysical  think- 

1  The  present  investigation  is,  in  its  primary  intention,  preliminary  to  a  study 
of  the  function  of  metaphysics  in  theology. 

2  Appearance  and  Reality,  Preface.  3  Textbook  of  Psychology,  p.  461. 
*  Introduction  to  Philosophy  (Eng.  tr.),  p.  27. 


INTRODUCTION  5 

ing  to  abide  by  the  Wolffian  classification,  however  utterly  we  may 
repudiate  the  method  employed  in  that  philosophy.  Our  classifica- 
tion would  then  be  as  follows:  Metaphysics  is  primarily  concrete  or 
material;  the  abstract  or  formal  part  is  derivative  and  of  little  inde- 
pendent interest.  Material  metaphysics  is  subdivided  into  cosmology, 
psychology,  and  theology,  while  formal  metaphysics  is  identical  with 
general  ontology.  From  this  last  the  transition  is  easy  to  epistemology, 
but  this  carries  one  beyond  the  domain  of  metaphysics  proper. 

The  definition  of  metaphysics  as  the  theory  or  science  of  reality, 
and  its  subdivision  into  cosmology,  psychology,  and  theology,  together 
involve  the  assumption  of  the  reality  of  the  world,  the  soul,  and  God. 
But  there  may  be  difference  of  view  as  to  whether  reality  is  to  be  regarded 
as  existing  within  or  beyond  immediate  human  experience.  Unsophis- 
ticated common  sense  declares  that  one  and  the  same  object  exists  both 
within  and  beyond,  i.e.,  it  is  partly  within  and  partly  beyond,  or  some- 
times within  and  sometimes  beyond,  and  yet  it  always  remains  one  and 
the  same  object  that  is  immanent  and  transcendent.  Many  types  of 
philosophy,  as  materialistic  sensationalism,  Platonizing  idealism,  and 
critical  agnosticism,  hold  that  reality  belongs  to  the  extra-empirical 
only;  experience  gives  but  appearance.  Within  recent  years  several 
philosophers1  having  certain  affiliations  with  the  older  empiricism  of 
Hume  and  Mill  have  taken  the  opposite  position.  Several  examples 
of  a  "philosophy  of  pure  experience"  have  appeared,  holding  that  the 
only  reality  is  the  reality  of  immediate  human  experience,2  and  thus 
that  the  real  nature  of  anything  is  "what  it  is  experienced  as."  This 
immediate  empiricism,  being  a  philosophy  of  immediate  human  experi- 
ence, might  be  called  the  newer  or  psychological  positivism,  as  dis- 
tinguished from  the  philosophy  of  mediate  human  experience,  which 
was  the  real  nature  of  the  older  empiricism  and  positivism.  But  any 
metaphysic  which  outrages  common-sense  cannot  satisfy  for  long,  and 
there  must  be  sought  a  way  of  doing  justice  to  reality  both  within  and 
beyond  immediate  human  experience,  and  that  without  duplicating 
reality,  as  Cartesian  dualism  does.  Philosophy  must  be  enlightened 
common-sense. 

1  E.g.,  Karl  Pearson,  The  Grammar  of  Science;   R.  Avenarius,  Kritik  der  reinen 
Erfahrung;   J.  Dewey,  "The  Postulate  of  Immediate  Empiricism,"  Journal  of  Phi- 
losophy, Psychology  and  Scientific  Methods,  II,  393-99. 

2  In  human  "experience"  here  social  as  well  as  individual  experience  is  meant 
to  be  included.     The  solipsistic  view,  which  would  confine  reality  to  immediate  indi- 
vidual human  experience,  is  too  outre  for  any  philosopher. 


6  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

The  treatment  accorded  metaphysics  in  the  various  types  of  "experi- 
ence philosophy"  is  significant.  The  positivism  of  Comte  was  inter- 
ested primarily  in  the  physical.  It  sought  to  get  beyond  immediate 
experience,  or  the  psychological,  to  the  reality  mediated  by  it.  The 
metaphysical  or  metempirical,  as  transcending  what  sense  experience 
mediated,  was  ignored  or  repudiated.  The  new  position  is  interested 
primarily  in  the  psychological.  It  seeks  to  express  the  reality  mediated 
by  psychological  experience  entirely  in  terms  of  psychology.  Corre- 
sponding to  the  old  metaphysics  there  might  conceivably  be  a  meta- 
psychology,  but  all  that  transcends  the  scope  of  psychology  is  either 
non-existent  or  inaccessible.  One  may  arbitrarily  take  his  choice  of 
world-views,  or  else  confine  himself  to  psychology.  Then  instead  of 
cosmology  and  theology  he  would  have  the  structural,  functional,  and 
genetic  psychology  of  the  idea  of  the  universe  and  the  God-idea  as 
created  by  human  thought.  The  only  real  metaphysics  left  is  the  more 
intricate  part  of  psychology.  But  this  position  cannot  commend  itself 
to  any  but  those  who  are  so  infatuated  with  psychology  as  to  be  oblivious 
of  the  claim  made  by  common-sense,  natural  science,  and  religion,  that 
there  is  a  reality  transcending  the  immediate  experience  of  human 
beings. 

Nor  will  it  do  to  make  a  mutually  exclusive  division  of  reality 
between  the  sciences  and  metaphysics,  assigning  to  the  former  the 
empirical  and  to  the  latter  the  transcendent.  Metaphysics  is  inter- 
ested in  reality  and  although  sometimes,  it  would  seem,  chiefly,  still 
not  merely,  in  transcendent  reality.  It  seeks  a  synthetical  apprehen- 
sion of  reality  which  shall  combine  inductions  from  the  facts  of  experi- 
ence with  workable  hypotheses  as  to  the  transcendent.  Hence  the 
line  of  cleavage  between  the  special  sciences  and  metaphysics  will  not 
be  a  hard  and  fast  one  so  far  as  content  is  concerned;  it  will  be  found 
rather  in  the  different  purposes  for  which  the  material  of  experience  is 
employed. 

This  begins  to  suggest  something  different  from  the  old  a-priori, 
dogmatic,  experience-contradicting  metaphysics  that  has  figured  so 
largely  in  the  history  of  theology  and  philosophy,  and  against  which 
the  modern  mind  has  so  justifiably  reacted.  The  modern  man  has  no 
more  use  for  the  mediaeval  types  of  metaphysics  than  he  has  for  the 
mediaeval  types  of  casuistry;  but  it  may  very  well  be  that  there  is  a 
place  and  a  need  in  modern  life  and  thought  for  casuistry  that  shall 
recognize  as  a  criterion  not  only  the  inner  motive  but  the  social  effect  of 
action,  and  for  a  metaphysic  that  shall  not  be  satisfied  with  the  test  of 


INTRODUCTION  7 

consistent  deduction  from  uncriticized  "innate"  principles  and  theo- 
logical doctrines,  but  that  shall  construct,  on  the  basis  of  the  essential 
postulates  of  morality  and  religion  and  other  fundamental  interests  of 
human  life  at  its  best,  a  world- view  that  will  be  regarded  as  a  hypothe- 
sis, one  element  in  the  verification  of  which  will  consist  in  its  agreement 
with  the  facts  of  human  experience.1 

1  N.  W.  Marshall,  in  his  book,  Theology  and  Truth,  p.  259,  describes  the  meta- 
physical method  as  "the  imposition  of  an  ideal  upon  the  given,  the  substitution  of 
the  ideal  for  .the  given,  and  the  assertion  that  this  ideal  is  the  real."  He  emphasizes 
the  incompetence  of  the  old  dogmatic  a-priorism,  but,  like  many  others,  does  not 
seem  to  recognize  the  need  and  the  possibility  of  a  different  type  of  metaphysics. 


PART  I 

THE  NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  AGAINST 
METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

3.  In  any  historical  investigation  of  the  mutual  relations  of  meta- 
physics and  theology  it  will  be  found  that  there  have  been  very  frequent 
and  most  vigorous  and  persistent  protests  against  the  introduction  or 
retention  of  the  metaphysical  element.  Or,  more  accurately,  because 
of  the  felt  unsatisfactoriness  of  the  results  of  attempting  to  harmonize 
the  doctrines  of  the  religion  in  question  with  other  supposed  truths 
about  reality  by  means  of  a  reasoning  process  which,  in  its  more  delib- 
erate and  methodical  forms,  is  called  metaphysics,  there  have  been 
repeated  reactions  against  the  attempt  itself  as  well  as  protests  against 
its  results.  In  contemporary  history  the  outstanding  example  of  such 
reactions  is  found  in  the  Ritschlian  theology,  but  the  history  of  Chris- 
tianity abounds  in  similar  reactions,  and  many  movements  of  the  same 
kind  have  occurred  in  many  other  religions  as  well.  For  purposes  of 
comparison  some  of  these  may  be  mentioned. 

In  the  history  of  Chinese  religion  we  find  the  reaction  of  the  Con- 
fucian Meng-tse  against  the  quasi-philosophical  speculations  of  Lao-tse 
and  his  not  very  numerous  followers.  In  this  Meng-tse  is  a  typical 
representative  of  his  people.  The  reaction  is  perhaps  not  so  much  an 
attempt  to  guard  a  threatened  religious  certainty  or  content  even,  as  it 
is  a  revulsion  of  the  constitutionally  practical  against  the  seemingly 
fruitless  subtleties  of  abstract  speculation. 

The  case  of  Buddhism  is  interesting.  Here  we  have  a  new  religion 
with  intensely  practical  interest,  reacting  emphatically  against  a  religion 
or  congeries  of  religions  whose  way  of  salvation  was  the  way  of  meta- 
physical speculation.  Buddha  would  have  his  disciples  consider  only 
what  favored  peace  and  holiness,  and  not  pry  into  such  questions  as  the 
finite  or  infinite  character  of  the  world.  To  primitive  Buddhism, 
ethically  protestant  as  it  was  against  a  religion  essentially  metaphysical, 
the  problem  of  excluding  metaphysical  speculation  was  a  matter  of  life 
and  death.  To  speculate  would  not  only  imperil  all  certainty  as  to  the 
vanity  of  this  present  life  and  lead  possibly  to  a  disintegration  of  the 
underlying  world-view,  but  also  and  especially  to  become  interested 
in  speculative  questions  would  be  to  be  bound  by  another  tie  to  the 
world,  and  thus  to  turn  deliberately  aside  from  the  Way  of  Salvation. 

8 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  Q 

In  the  ancient  Greek  religion  the  protest  against  metaphysical 
speculation  was  comparatively  insignificant  and  ultimately  failed. 
There  was  an  inner  kinship  between  the  religion  of  this  naturalistic 
and  liberty-loving  people  and  the  naturalizing  criticism  and  free  specu- 
lation of  the  philosophers.  Still  there  were  outbursts  of  conservative 
religious  zeal  from  time  to  time,  as,  for  instance,  against  Xenophanes, 
whose  theological  speculations  seemed  to  the  people  to  be  destroying  their 
religion ;  again  after  and  in  reaction  against  the  at  first  welcomed  teaching 
of  Anaxagoras  in  Athens ;  and  yet  again  in  the  attempt  of  Aristophanes 
to  discredit  such  free  thinkers  as  Euripides  and  Socrates,  followed  by  the 
martyrdom  of  the  latter.  Among  the  more  practical  and  less  specu- 
lative Romans  the  conservative  movement  in  the  Augustan  age  was 
more  successful. 

In  the  bitter,  persecuting  hostility  of  ancient  Mazdeism  toward 
Manichaeism'  we  have  a  typical  example  of  the  reaction  of  a  religion 
of  arbitrary  will  against  all  syncretizing  and  consequently  rationalizing 
tendencies.  The  case  is  similar  to  that  of  Buddhism,  save  that  here 
it  was  the  old  obedience-religion  which  reacted  against  the  new  rational- 
istic heresy,  while  there  it  was  the  new  heretical  obedience-religion  which 
reacted  against  the  old  speculative  religion.  In  the  Manichaean 
system,  for  the  antagonism  of  the  good  and  evil  personal  beings,  Ormuzd 
and  Ahriman,  there  was  substituted  the  opposition  of  two  impersonal 
cosmic  principles,  while  instead  of  authoritative  revelation  gnostic 
insight  was  made  the  criterion  of  certainty.  There  was  not  only  a 
radical  departure  from  the  older  content,  but  the  adoption  of  a  principle 
which  made  further  departure  probable  and  thus  tended  to  undermine 
all  certainty  as  to  the  older  beliefs.  This  explains  the  persecuting 
reaction. 

Throughout  the  history  of  the  religion  of  Israel  there  can  be  traced 
an  ever-renewed  opposition  on  the  part  of  the  vital  piety  of  the  older 
faith  against  a  series  of  leveling  movements  primarily  of  life  rather  than 
of  reflective  thought,  but  tending  in  the  direction  of  heretical  meta- 
physical speculation.  An  early  example  is  the  conflict  of  the  prophetic 
Jahvism  with  Baalism  and  other  influences  of  pagan  civilization.  Every 
anti-Jahvistic  movement  was  to  be  crushed  out,  regardless  of  any 
evidence  that  might  be  advanced  in  its  favor.1  The  strenuous  protest 
of  the  Chasidim  against  the  religiously  perilous  Hellenistic  culture — 
a  protest  giving  its  real  strength  to  the  Maccabean  uprising — was  closely 
similar  in  religious  interest  to  the  earlier  Jahvistic  prophetism.  Prob- 

'Deut.  13:1-5- 


10  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

ably  continuous  with  this  Chasid  movement  was  the  settled,  and  finally 
successful  opposition  of  the  Pharisees  to  the  rationalistic  and  sceptical 
Sadducees.  To  the  pious  Jew  Greek  science  was  an  invention  of  the 
devil.1  Even  Philo  acknowledges2  that  his  synthesis  of  Greek  wisdom 
with  Hebrew  religion  was  not  favorably  received  by  contemporary 
Judaism.  Later  expressions  of  the  same  exclusive  religious  conserva- 
tism appear  in  the  distrust  evinced  toward  the  rationalizing  tend- 
encies of  Moses  Maimonides,  and  in  the  abrupt  excommunication  of 
the  detested  heretic,  Spinoza. 

But  perhaps  the  closest  parallel  to  the  reactionary  movement  in 
Christianity  is  found  in  the  history  of  Mohammedanism.3  From  the 
ninth  century  to  the  eleventh  there  existed  in  the  East  a  tendency  to 
seek  to  harmonize  the  doctrines  of  Islam  with  the  principles  of  reason, 
sometimes  interpreted  from  a  neo-Platonic,  at  other  times  from  an 
Aristotelian  standpoint.  Among  the  reactionary  movements  the  most 
violent  was  that  headed  by  Khalif  Motawakkel;  the  most  systematic 
and  permanent,  that  undertaken  by  Al  Ghazzali,  whose  Destruction  of 
the  Philosphers  championed  the  Muslim  faith  against  the  rationalists. 
He  combated  especially  those  Aristotelian  notions  adopted  by  Al 
Farabi  and  Avicenna  which  involved  a  departure  from  Islamic  faith, 
such  as  that  the  world  is  eternal,  that  God's  essence  is  thought  only, 
that  God  takes  no  cognizance  of  particulars,  and  that  the  soul  only  is 
immortal.  Moreover  he  sought  to  found  religious  certitude  upon 
mystical  religious  experience  rather  than  upon  mere  tradition  or  the 
confirmations  of  reason.  It  is  significant,  not  so  much  of  the  ability 
of  Al  Ghazzali  as  of  the  genius  of  the  Mohammedan  religion,  that  from 
the  twelfth  century  to  the  nineteenth  orthodoxy  and  mystic  piety  pre- 
vailed in  the  Eastern  schools.  In  the  West  also  the  rationalistic  phi- 
losophy was  rejected.  Even  the  famous  Averroes,  like  the  sceptical 
Omar  Khayyam  of  the  East,  had  his  popularity  and  influence  chiefly 
outside  of  Mohammedan  circles.  By  his  own  people  he  was  proscribed 
and  banished,  with  the  result  that  orthodoxy  and  implicit  faith  remained 
triumphant.4 

1  Book  of  Enoch;  see  Bigg,  The  Christian  Platonists  of  Alexandria,  p.  50. 

a  De  Somniis,  i.  16,17. 

3  Cf.  De  Boer,  The  History  of  Philosophy  in  Islam  (Eng.  tr.),  passim. 

*  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  among  the  religions  mentioned,  those  in  which  the 
anti-metaphysical  movement  has  triumphed  are  strongly  practical  in  interest  and 
have  a  tendency  toward  legalism  and  an  appeal  to  external  authority.  Christianity 
resembles  them  in  these  characteristics;  will  the  reaction  against  metaphysics  finally 
prevail  in  it  also  ? 


NATURE   AND  MOTIVATION   OF   THE   REACTION  II 

4.  Coming  to  Christianity  we  find  already  in  the  New  Testament 
a  rejection  of  mere  intellectualism  and  uncontrolled  speculation  in  mat- 
ters of  religion. 

In  the  recorded  teachings  of  Jesus  there  is  a  recognition  of  the  spirit- 
ual conditions  of  religious  knowledge.  The  largest  content  of  religious 
truth  is  not  necessarily  the  possession  of  "the  wise  and  understanding."1 
Not  intellectual  qualifications  but  faith  and  moral  obedience  are  the 
primary  requisites  for  religious  certainty.2 

In  the  early  writings  of  Paul  there  is  a  discrediting  of  "wordly  wis- 
dom" in  the  realm  of  religion.3  It  is  evident  that  he  includes  in  this 
category  the  Grecian  philosophy;4  apart  from  the  gospel  and  Christian 
experience,  not  even  this  highest  secular  wisdom  can  give  adequate 
religious  knowledge.  The  "natural  man"  cannot  arrive  at  the  truth 
of  faith;  it  is  spiritually  discerned.5  And  not  the  content  alone,  but  the 
certainty  of  religious  conviction  also  has  its  source  primarily  in  religious 
experience  rather  than  in  rational  processes.6  Christian  faith  should 
not  stand  in  the  wisdom  of  men.7 

In  the  later  Epistle  to  the  Colossians  the  situation  confronted  is 
very  clearly  the  encroachment  into  the  church  of  some  form  of  gnostic 
thought.  The  writer  fears  lest  this  type  of  "philosophy"  should  play 
havoc  with  the  Christian  community.8  He  is  especially  solicitous  lest 
there  should  be  a  loss  with  respect  to  the  content  of  the  Christian  faith, 
and  above  all  lest  the  fantastic  speculation  about  "powers"  should 
lead  to  a  failure  to  recognize  the  unique  place  of  Christ  as  "  above  all 
principality  and  power."9 

In  the  Pastoral  Epistles  the  problem  has  become  still  more  serious, 
and  the  protest  against  a  spurious  "gnosis"10  seems  to  be  the  main 
purpose  of  the  letters.  It  is  a  matter  of  the  utmost  concern  that  the 
essential  doctrines  of  Christian  faith  should  be  conserved,  and  that  no 
incongruous  elements  should  be  "introduced.""  The  moral  effect  of 

'Matt.  11:25. 

2  Matt.  6:22,  23;  John  7:17.  4 1  Cor.  1:22. 

3 1  Cor.  2:1,  2.  s  I  Cor.  1:21;  2:14;  Rom.  1:21,  22. 

6  Similar  to  the  teaching  of  Jesus  and  Paul  (in  these  letters)  is  that  'of  James  to 
the  effect  that  religious  knowledge  has  its  source  in  inner  revelation  (Jas.  1:553: 13-17). 
vl  Cor.  2:5,  12,  13.  8  Col.  2:8.  9  Col.  2:9,  10. 

10 1  Tim.  6 : 20;  cf.  Titus  i :  16;  I  Tim.  1:4;  4:  i,  3,  as  indications  that  gnosticism 
was  the  movement  attacked. 

"I  Tim.  1:3,  19;  4:6;  6:3;  II  Tim.  2:2;  4  =  3,4,7;  Titus  1:9,  n;  2:1. 


12  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

heresy  is  dreaded.1  But  there  is  a  care  for  certainty  also.  The  specu- 
lative, "questioning"  attitude  is  discouraged,2  and  appeal  is  made  for 
assurance  to  divine  revelation,3  and  explicitly  to  the  authority  of  Jesus 
Christ  and  of  the  apostle  Paul.4 

In  perhaps  still  later  epistles  (James  [?],  Jude,  and  II  Peter)  the 
still  greater  intensity  of  the  reaction  is  indicated  by  the  increased 
strength  of  the  language  of  denunciation  of  "  destructive  heresies."5 
It  is  more  keenly  felt  than  ever  that  a  departure  from  the  essentials  of 
Christian  belief  proves  disastrous  for  the  moral  life,  and  so  is  to  be 
avoided  as  diligently  as  sin  itself.6 

5.  In  dealing  with  the  anti-metaphysical  movement  in  the  history 
of  Christian  thought,  only  outstanding  and  typical  examples  can  well 
be  adduced.  In  the  early  church  Marcion,  Tatian,  Tertullian,  and 
Athanasius  demand  special  attention. 

Marcion,  as  Harnack  says,  was  one  of  the  few  pronouncedly  typical 
religious  characters  before  Augustine.7  He  attached  himself  with  vigor 
to  what  he  took  to  be  the  religious  kernel  of  Christianity,  viz.,  the 
Pauline  gospel  of  grace  and  faith,  and  rejected  not  only  the  additional 
content  incorporated  into  Christian  doctrine  from  Jewish  tradition, 
but  also — if,  with  Harnack,  we  read  correctly  between  the  lines  of 
Justin  and  Tertullian — the  additional  certainty  sought  by  the  Gnostics 
through  cosmological  speculation.  While  Marcion  doubtless  shared 
many  of  the  characteristically  Greek  ideas  of  his  gnostic  contempo- 
raries, in  his  thinking  religious  experience  was  construed  more,  after  the 
manner  of  Paul,  as  a  moral  renewal  than  as  a  transformation  of  under- 
lying substance;  and  so  cosmological  speculation  generally,  whether  of 
Gnostics  or  Catholics,  was  rejected  as  injurious,  rather  than  helpful,  to 
religion.  The  value  which  this  position  was  felt  to  have  is  indicated 
by  the  very  large  following  which  Marcion  secured. 

The  place  of  the  type  of  apology  represented  by  Tatian  in  the  general 
apologetic  movement  of  the  time  requires  to  be  reviewed  with  special 
care.  The  real  theological  position  of  any  apologist  is  usually  difficult 
to  determine,  for  the  reason  that  the  exigencies  of  controversy  demand 
that  he  view  things  largely  from  the  general  point  of  view  of  his  oppo- 
nent. Thus  there  is  often  a  wide  difference  between  the  basis  of  the 

1 1  Tim.  1:20;  6:4,5;  II  Tim.  2:14,  16-1 8,  23;  2:25,26. 

3 1  Tim.  1:3;  6:3. 

3 1  Tim.  1:4.  s  II  Pet.  2:1. 

« I  Tim.  2:7;  6:3;  II  Tim.  3:14.  6  II  Pet.  2;  Jude;  cf.  Jas.  3:15. 

7  Harnack,  History  of  Dogma  (Eng.  tr.),  I,  284;  see  further  pp.  266-69. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  13 

apologist's  own  religious  certainty  and  the  foundation  which  he  seeks  to 
lay  for  a  favorable  attitude  toward  his  religion  on  the  part  of  others. 
Naturally  enough  this  frequently  involves  a  difference  too  between  the 
content  held  and  the  content  defended.  The  history  of  the  theology 
of  the  typical  early  Christian  apologist  was  somewhat  as  follows.  He 
had  sought  the  satisfaction  of  his  religious  needs  in  Greek  philosophy, 
only  to  be  disappointed.  Being  brought  into  contact  with  the  Christian 
gospel,  it  appealed  to  him  as  meeting  his  requirements  and  called  forth 
his  faith.  He  accepted  it  for  what  it  claimed  to  be,  a  divine  revelation, 
and  continued  to  believe  in  it  as  such  because  it  continued  to  satisfy 
his  religious  needs.  But  especially  in  the  intervals  between  times  of 
deeply  emotional  religious  experience,  the  conclusion  as  to  revelation 
tended  to  become  a  premise,  so  that  the  thinker  would  reassure  him- 
self by  recalling  that  his  beliefs  were  vouched  for  by  divine  authority. 
But  this  was  just  the  point  at  issue  in  discussion  with  non-Christians, 
and  could  not,  of  course,  be  made  the  presupposition  of  an  apologetic. 
Recourse  was  had  necessarily  to  the  content  of  the  gospel,  as  the  apologist 
understood  it.  But  Christianity,  as  the  apologist  understood  it,  was  the 
true  philosophy.  He  had  come  to  it  with  his  thinking  more  or  less 
saturated  with  Greek  philosophical  concepts,  and  in  accepting  it  he  had 
retained  many  of  his  former  ideas.  The  result  was  that  the  Christianity 
so  appropriated  was  considerably  modified  in  form  and  ultimately  in 
content.  The  course  naturally  suggested  to  the  apologist  accordingly 
was  to  show  that  the  doctrinal  content  of  the  Christian  religion  was  not 
only  unobjectionable  to  the  Greek  mind,  but  acceptable  in  the  highest 
degree.  It  is  the  highest  self-expression  of  the  divine  Reason,  and  so 
is  more  truly  rational  and  philosophical  than  the  philosophy  of  the 
Greeks.  Such  was  the  course  taken  by  Justin,  Aris tides,  and  Athe- 
nagoras.  But  just  here  Tatian  diverged  from  the  beaten  track.1  With 
respect  to  the  basis  of  his  own  certainty  and  the  main  content  of  his 
theology  he  does  not,  in  his  "Address  to  the  Greeks,"  differ  materially 
from  the  others;  but  in  his  general  attitude  and  method  of  apologetics 
he  does.2  He  is  violently  antagonistic  to  Greek  philosophy,  and  dis- 
parages speculative  attempts  as  being  fruitless  of  practical  results. 
Instead  of  framing  subtle  arguments  he  makes  dogmatic  statements. 
Like  others  of  a  much  later  date,  he  evidently  thought  dogmatics  the 
best  apologetics. 

1  Tatian  was  an  Oriental,  and  though  he  had  studied  Greek  philosophy  before  his 
conversion,  he  probably  had  not  been  strongly  seized  by  it. 

3  As  an  apologist  Theophilus  of  Antioch  belongs  in  the  same  general  class  with 
Tatian. 


14  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

Irenaeus  opposed  speculation  whenever  it  appeared  to  him  either 
useless  or  dangerous.  No  good  could  possibly  come  of  speculating  on 
such  questions  as  what  God  was  doing  before  he  made  the  world;  and 
on  the  other  hand  enough  had  been  seen  of  the  vagaries  of  gnosticism 
to  know  the  harm  that  might  come  when  one  was  not  guided  by  the 
norm  of  apostolic  tradition.  But  Irenaeus  can  hardly  be  taken  as  a 
typical  opponent  of  theological  speculation  as  such,  and  it  is  chiefly  in 
another  connection  that  he  is  significant. 

It  is  Tertullian  who  of  all  the  Fathers  is  the  outstanding  exemplar 
of  animosity  toward  all  signs  of  the  encroachment  of  metaphysics  into 
theology.  This  African  was  a  prodigious  believer.  If  he  was  almost 
a  heretic,  it  was  not  that  there  were  not  articles  enough  in  his  creed. 
He  had  no  trouble  about  religious  certainty.  He  was  lawyer  enough  to 
accept  all  he  was  told  on  proper  authority,  and  enthusiast  enough  to 
find  experimental  confirmation  for  most  of  it.  He  did  not  need  philos- 
ophy, therefore,  as  a  prop  to  threatened  certainty,  and  he  had  no  patience 
with  those  who  felt  it  to  be  essential.  Tertullian  will  have  "no  curious 
disputation  after  possessing  Christ  Jesus,  no  inquisition  after  believing 
the  Gospel."1 

But  Tertullian  did  not  regard  philosophy  as  just  superfluous.  That 
would  not  have  accounted  for  the  intensity  of  his  antagonism.  It  was 
positively  dangerous;  it  was  the  instigator  of  heresies.  For  Tertullian 
was  concerned  with  the  conservation  of  that  whole  body  of  doctrine  which 
was  accredited  by  those  Scriptures  which  were  recognized  by  the  apos- 
tolic churches  and  interpreted  according  to  the  rule  of  faith  which  was 
observed  by  those  same  apostolic  churches.  It  is  this  conservative 
interest  in  content  which  explains  his  extended  vigorous  refutation  of 
Marcion.  To  be  sure  his  interpretation  of  the  Christian  gospel  was 
largely  Pauline,  as  was  Marcion's;  but  the  "Pontic  heresiarch,"  in 
attempting  to  limit  his  creed  to  the  essence  of  Christianity,  had  elim- 
inated much  that  to  Tertullian  seemed  absolutely  essential.  In  fact 
nothing  authoritatively  taught  was  non-essential.  At  any  rate  one 
need  neither  reject  the  present  classification  of  Tertullian  with  Marcion 
on  the  ground  that  the  former  found  occasion  to  write  a  few  books 
against  the  latter,  nor  refuse  to  regard  the  Montanist  bishop  as  funda- 
mentally an  opponent  of  speculative  theology  for  the  mere  reason  that 
some  speculative  elements  have  stolen  into  his  theology,  any  more  than 
he  disputes  the  fact  that  the  eminent  defender  of  the  authority  of  the 
Catholic  church  became  himself  a  schismatic.  Consistent  inconsis- 
1  The  Prescription  against  Heretics,  chap.  vii. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  15 

tency  is  all  that  can  be  expected  of  this  omnivorous  believer  to  whose 
ready  appetite  the  choicest  morsel  that  could  be  presented  was  the 
authoritative  but  incredible ! 

But  it  would  be  easy  to  do  injustice  to  this  remarkable  and  indeed 
admirable  man.  It  was  the  intensity  of  his  practical  interest,  of  his 
moral  and  religious  zeal,  that  impelled  him  to  make  light  of  the  more 
theoretical  problems.  It  was  not  that  he  loved  thought  less,  but  that 
he  loved  life  more.  It  was  because  philosophy  bred  such  "scorpions" 
as  Basilides  and  Valentinus,  or  at  best  produced  "a  mottled  Christianity 
of  Stoic,  Platonic,  and  dialectic  composition,"  that  he  could  brook  no 
interference  of  the  comparative  trivialities  of  the  Academy  with  the 
momentous  business  of  the  church. 

In  the  case  of  those  successors  of  Tertullian  in  the  early  church 
who  can  fairly  be  reckoned  as  in  any  sense  anti-metaphysical,  the 
matter  of  immediate  concern  seems  to  have  been  not  certainty  but 
content.  The  reaction  is  not  explicitly  against  speculation  as  such, 
nor  is  it  even  primarily  against  premises;  it  is  against  conclusions, 
as  being  incompatible  with  the  content  of  accredited  and  essential 
Christian  faith.  Origen's  great  system  of  metaphysical  theology  had 
appeared,  and  to  some  of  its  conclusions  Methodius  took  exception, 
not  on  philosophical,  but  on  religious  and  traditional,  grounds.  As 
against  the  Sabellians,  Dionysius  of  Alexandria  was  led  to  develop 
Origen's  doctrine  of  the  generation  of  the  Son  into  the  view  that  the 
Son  is  a  creature.  This  called  forth  an  emphatic  protest  from  Dio- 
nysius of  Rome,  who,  on  grounds  of  traditional  Christianity,  held  to 
the  unity  and  tripersonality  of  God,  without  attempting  any  meta- 
physical elaboration  of  the  doctrine.  When  Arius  was  known  to  be 
teaching  such  a  radically  modified  Origenism  as  emphasized  the  differ- 
ence between  the  Father  and  the  Son  until  the  Son  became  virtu- 
ally a  quasi-divine  being  to  be  worshiped  in  addition  to  the  Father, 
but  who,  because  he  was  not  absolutely  divine,  could  not  by  his 
incarnation  guarantee  the  redemption  of  human  nature,  Alexander, 
bishop  of  Alexandria,  rejected  the  doctrine  on  purely  religio-dogmatic 
grounds,  denounced  it  as  blasphemy,  and  anathematized  all  Arian 
sympathizers.1  In  all  these  cases  the  protest  is  made  from  religious 
motives  against  a  content  (or  the  apparent  implications  of  that 
content)  which,  as  an  alien  and  incongruous  element  had  been  intro- 
duced into  Christian  theology  by  a  presumably  too  free  use  of  meta- 

1  Alexander,  however,  did  not  refrain  from  making  incidental  use  of  some  meta- 
physical considerations. 


1 6  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

physical  speculation.1  Essentially  similar  to  these  reactions  of  Metho- 
dius, the  Roman  Dionysius,  and  Alexander,  but  more  thoroughgoing 
and  effective  than  any  of  them,  was  that  of  the  great  Athanasius, 
whose  position  with  reference  to  metaphysics  and  theology  we  must 
now  examine. 

With  Athanasius  the  interests  of  practical  religious  faith  were  pri- 
mary and  central.  The  Greek  christological  doctrine  in  its  initial  stages 
had  been  the  product  of  the  interest  in  redemption  (with  the  help  of 
certain  originally  Platonic  and  Stoic  conceptions),  but,  as  of  ten  happens 
in  the  course  of  theological  development,  this  originally  immediate  inter- 
est became  more  and  more  remote,  and  Christology  became  interesting 
more  and  more  for  its  own  sake.  Under  these  circumstances  meta- 
physical speculation  tended  to  escape  from  the  bonds  of  the  practical 
religious  interest,  so  that  elements  inimical  to  the  interest  in  redemption 
were  at  any  moment  liable  to  be  introduced.  This  occurred  when 
Paul  of  Samosata  was  compelled  by  his  Aristotelian  metaphysics  to 
regard  the  Logos  as  a  mere  power  of  God,  not  personally  pre-existent 
but  bestowed  upon  the  man  Jesus  to  equip  him  for  his  work.  This 
involved  a  denial  of  Origen's  doctrine  that  Christ  and  God  are  one  in 
substance.  Paul  was  condemned  as  a  heretic.  Lucian,  therefore,  who 
was  subject  to  the  same  philosophical  influence,  conceded  that  the  Logos 
was  personally  pre-existent,  but  maintained  that  he  was  not  of  the  same 
substance  with  the  Father,  in  that  he  was  created.  This  doctrine  was 
popularized  by  Arius,  and  elicited,  as  we  have  seen,  the  anathema  of 
Alexander.  But  Arianism  was  not  so  easily  killed,  and  Athanasius 
was  compelled  to  take  up  the  weapons  of  controversy.  To  this  cham- 
pion of  orthodoxy  it  seemed  indisputable  that  unless  the  pre-existent 
Logos  is  truly  and  literally  God,  there  is  no  guarantee  that  by  his  incar- 
nation human  nature  is  made  divine  and  thus  redeemed  from  eternal 
death.  Thus  from  the  viewpoint  of  Athanasius,  and  indeed  of  con- 
temporary Christian  piety  in  so  far  as  it  was  conscious  of  its  own  true 
nature,  the  issues  involved  in  the  controversy  were  literally  eternal  life 
and  eternal  death. 

1  Because  the  particular  article  of  faith  threatened  by  the  teachings  of  Dionysius 
of  Alexandria  and  Arius  was  so  essential  (theoretically  at  least)  to  the  certainty  of  the 
belief  in  redemption  (though  not  to  the  assurance  that  the  Christian  religion  was  an 
authoritative  divine  revelation),  there  consequently  was  implicit  in  the  reactions  of 
Dionysius  of  Rome  and  Alexander  a  remote  interest  in  religious  certainty,  as  well  as 
the  immediate  interest  in  doctrinal  content.  This  interest  in  certainty  becomes  more 
explicit  in  Athanasius.  It  remains,  however,  the  purely  religious  certainty  that  is 
affected.  The  question  of  theological  certainty  is  not  involved. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION        17 

This  vital  religious  interest,  and  practically  nothing  else,  determined 
the  nature  of  Athanasius'  theology.  As  Harnack  says,  his  "greatness 
consisted  in  reduction,  in  the  energy  with  which  from  a  multitude  of 
divergent  speculations  claiming  to  rest  on  tradition,  he  gave  exclusive 
validity  to  those  in  which  the  strength  of  religion  lay."1  Without 
formally  abandoning  the  conservative  theological  method,  he  had  in  prin- 
ciple really  adopted  the  radical  method  in  a  very  conservative  form,  and  he 
was  thus  able  to  keep  out  of  his  doctrine  all  religiously  objectionable 
philosophical  elements,  and  at  the  same  time  maintain  his  inner  certainty 
unimpaired.  Moreover  he  did  not  go  on  to  a  philosophical  rational- 
ization and  defence  of  his  religious  position.  He  simply  undertook  to 
refute  error  by  appeal  to  dogmatic  religious  considerations,  believing 
that  once  the  false  was  refuted,  the  truth  would  then  require  only  to  be 
declared  to  be  accepted  by  the  true  Christian.2  Indeed  it  would  seem 
that  he  even  progressively  succeeded  in  eliminating  the  more  distinc- 
tively Origenistic  (and  so,  ultimately  philosophical)  elements  from  his 
own  thought.3  He  did  not,  like  Tertullian,  decry  all  philosophy  as 
such,  but  he  managed  to  dispense  with  its  services  to  an  almost 
unprecedented  extent. 

6.  The  religious  reactions  in  the  Roman  church  against  the  meta- 
physical element  in  theology  have  been  of  two  main  types,  which  may 
be  designated  as  the  experiential  and  the  ecclesiastical,  respectively. 

The  experiential  reaction  is  represented  by  the  opposition  of 
Bernard  to  Abelard  and  of  Pascal  to  Descartes.  It  was  a  reaction  against 
a  critical  rationalism  that  threatened  to  make  serious  inroads  upon  the 
content  of  Catholic  doctrine.  It  was  made  in  the  interests  of  evangelical 
piety  and  its  appeal  was  away  from  objective  philosophical  standards, 
thus  making  for  the  greater  independence  of  the  individual.  The 
ecclesiastical  reaction  is  represented  by  the  opposition  of  Duns  Scotus 
and  Occam  to  the  type  of  thought  represented  by  Thomas  Aquinas  and 
his  school.  It  was  a  reaction  against  a  realistic  scholasticism  which 
had  undertaken  to  demonstrate  the  doctrines  of  the  church.  In  so  far 
as  scholastic  rationalism  succeeded,  it  enabled  the  theologian  to  do 
without  the  authority  of  the  church,  and  in  so  far  as  it  failed  to  convince 
the  critical  of  the  rationality  of  the  doctrines  taught  by  the  church,  it 
was  hostile  to  implicit  faith  in  the  church  as  an  authoritative  teacher. 
The  reaction  against  it  was  at  bottom  in  the  interests  of  ecclesiastical 

1  Harnack,  op.  tit.,  Ill,  140. 

2  Against  the  Heathen,  1:7;   6:3. 

3  Cf .  A.  Robertson,  The  Nicene  and  Post-Nicene  Fathers,  2d  Series,  IV,  Ixviii. 


1 8  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS   IN  THEOLOGY 

authority;  its  appeal  was  away  from  subjective  opinions  and  specula- 
tions to  the  external  authority  of  the  church,  thus  making  for  the 
greater  dependence  of  the  individual.  But,  with  all  these  differences, 
what  these  two  types  of  reactionary  movement  stood  for  and  that 
against  which  they  reacted  were  all  represented  already  in  the  great 
Augustine,  and  to  some  extent  are  traceable  to  his  influence.  The 
realism  still  present  in  Thomas  Aquinas  was  first  introduced  into  west- 
ern theology  by  Augustine;  not  only  Bernard  but  also  Pascal  might 
have  been  called  "Augustinus  redivivus,"  for  they  both  stood  for  a 
revival  of  the  evangelical  piety  of  the  great  African;  Abelard's  and 
Descartes'  method  of  universal  doubt  is  used  as  a  preliminary  means  of 
certainty  by  Augustine,  and  some  of  Descartes'  best  known  and  most 
fundamental  rationalistic  arguments  exist  in  almost  the  same  form  in 
the  Augustinian  theology;  finally,  it  is  chiefly  to  the  same  Augustine 
that  Romanism  owes  that  doctrine  of  the  authority  of  the  church  as  a 
basis  of  religious  certainty  which  obtained  supremacy  by  means  of  the 
Scotist  reaction.  Before  examining  these  reactionary  movements 
further,  it  may  be  well  to  inquire  whether  there  may  not  have  been  in 
Augustine  himself  something  similar  in  the  way  of  a  religious  reaction 
against  the  metaphysical. 

We  find  this  to  have  been  the  case.  Augustine  learned  to  make 
great  use  of  metaphysics,  and  yet  his  conversion-experience  itself 
included  a  reaction  in  the  interest  of  religious  certainty  away  from  the 
acknowledged  uncertainty  of  the  academic  philosophy  to  an  experi- 
mental knowledge  of  the  power  of  faith,  and  also,  with  respect  to 
content,  away  from  the  Manichaean  dualistic  philosophy  to  the  more 
soul-satisfying  belief  in  the  sovereign  grace  of  the  one  righteous  God. 
In  his  opposition  to  Pelagianism,  too,  there  is  at  least  something  similar. 
Here  there  is  a  strong  reaction  in  the  interests  of  the  religion  of  divine 
grace  against  the  Stoic  ethics  of  Pelagius  with  its  implicit  anti-Christian 
metaphysical  basis. 

Bernard's  opposition  to  Abelard  was  the  reaction  of  pious  belief 
against  daring  criticism.  Fundamental  to  Abelard's  rationalistic  atti- 
tude was  not  simply  the  nominalistic  point  of  view  learned  from  Ros- 
cellinus,  but  the  influence  of  Greek  philosophy.  He  esteemed  the 
Greek  philosophers  more  highly  than  the  Church  fathers  and  placed 
them  but  little  below  Jesus  himself.  The  philosophical  doctrine  of  the 
soul  of  the  world  he  identified  with  the  Christian  doctrine  of  the  Holy 
Spirit.1  But  it  was  not  merely  against  particular  changes  in  respect  of 

1  Opera,  II,  379. 


NATURE   AND   MOTIVATION   OF   THE   REACTION  19 

content,  or  against  uncertainty  on  particular  topics,  that  Bernard 
reacted.  It  was  against  the  whole  process  for  which  his  opponent  stood, 
and  which  imperiled  the  whole  content  and  rendered  all  uncertain,  viz., 
the  making  of  dialectical  metaphysics,  instead  of  religious  faith,  the 
primary  thing  in  theological  construction.  WTith  Abelard  metaphysics 
was  no  longer  strictly  ancillary  to  theology.  He  was  thus  led  to  esteem 
doubt  very  highly  as  leading  to  inquiry,  and  inquiry  to  knowledge  of 
the  truth,  or  at  least  to  a  highly  probable  opinion.  Faith  was  simply 
belief  of  the  more  probable  of  conflicting  opinions.  But  Bernard  could 
not  endure  to  have  the  treasures  of  faith  "suspended  uncertainly  on 
vague  and  various  human  opinions."1  The  verities  of  faith  are  ren- 
dered certain,  not  simply  by  external  evidence,  but  by  the  internal 
evidence  of  the  spiritual  experience.  Thus  "faith  is  not  an  opinion; 
it  is  a  certitude."2  Piety,  not  philosophy,  is  the  door  to  knowledge. 

Thomas  a  Kempis,  who  was  greatly  influenced  by  the  writings  of 
Bernard,  many  of  which  he  transcribed,  exhibits  a  similar  reaction 
against  the  subtleties  of  scholastic  philosophy  in  favor  of  the  immediate 
certainty  of  religious  faith. 

What  would  it  profit  [he  asks]  to  know  by  heart  ....  the  sayings  of  all 
the  philosophers,  without  the  love  of  God  and  without  grace  ?  .  .  .  .  What 
availeth  it  to  cavil  and  dispute  much  about  dark  and  hidden  things,  for  igno- 
rance of  which  we  shall  not  be  reproved  at  the  day  of  judgment  ?  .  .  .  .  And 
what  have  we  to  do  with  genera  and  species  ?  He  to  whom  the  eternal  Word 
speaketh  is  delivered  from  many  questionings.3 

Essentially  similar  is  the  anti-Cartesian,  anti-rationalistic  reaction 
of  Pascal.  Decartes'  submission  of  all  his  opinions  to  the  authority  of 
the  church  did  not  strike  his  readers  as  being  an  integral  part  of  his 
system  of  philosophy,  and  the  general  impression  which  his  method 
created  was  that  the  making  fundamental  in  theology  of  the  principle  of 
doubt  would  result  disastrously.  Pascal  stood  out  boldly  for  a  return 
to  the  principle  of  faith  rather  than  doubt  in  matters  of  religion. 
Arguing  to  the  existence  of  God  from  the  works  of  nature  is  very  well, 
he  claims,  when  addressed  to  believers,  but  it  fails  to  convince  the 
irreligious.  Religious  certainty  is  not  produced  by  rational  processes 
but  has  its  source  in  the  emotional  nature.  "The  heart  has  its  reasons, 

which  mere  reason  does  not  comprehend It  is  the  heart  that 

feels  God,  and  not  the  reason.    This  is  faith:  God  sensible  to  the  heart 

1  Ibid.,  I,  1449. 

2  Ibid.,  1450. 

3  Of  the  Imitation  of  Christ,  I,  i,  3;  III,  i,  2. 


20  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

and  not  to  the  reason To  scorn  philosophy  is  truly  to  philoso- 
phize."1 

It  is  interesting  to  trace  the  way  in  which  nominalism,  which  was 
originally  anti-religious,  became  the  servant  of  religious  reaction  against 
the  metaphysical  element  in  theology.  From  the  time  of  Augustine 
western  philosophy  and  theology  had  been  dominated  by  the  so-called 
Platonic  realism,  which  was  simply  a  generalized  way  of  stating  the 
other-worldly  ideal  which  had  already  been  imported  into  European 
religious  life  and  thought  from  the  Orient.  According  to  this  realism 
true  reality  belongs  not  to  the  vain  and  transitory  things  of  this  world, 
but  to  the  eternal  and  ideal  things  of  the  transcendent  realm.  This 
other-wordliness,  in  point  of  view  so  foreign  to  the  natural  man,  could 
only  be  sustained  by  constant  effort.  Consequently  the  authority  of 
the  church  and,  through  the  church,  of  the  Bible  and  the  state,  monas- 
ticism,  mystical  contemplation,  and  Platonic  metaphysics  were  called 
into  its  service.  But  under  the  insistent  influence  of  sense-experience 
and  immediate  practical  needs,  assisted  by  the  less  transcendent  and 
more  positivistic  Aristotelian  philosophy,  men  began  to  substitute  for 
the  other-worldly  point  of  view  a  this-worldliness  which  finally  took 
shape  in  nominalism.  According  to  this  philosophy  true  reality  belongs 
to  the  particular  things  of  this  present  world,  while  their  supposed  ideal 
transcendent  counterparts  are  mere  names,  empty  sound,  and  nothing 
more.  When  Berengar,  a  forerunner  of  nominalism,  and  Roscellinus, 
its  first  known  representative,  dared  to  apply  the  new  principle  of  criti- 
cism, the  one  to  the  doctrine  of  the  Eucharistj  the  other  to  the  doctrine 
of  the  Trinity,  the  one  was  met  with  physical  compulsion,  the  other 
with  metaphysical.  Ideally,  according  to  the  extreme  notion  then 
current,  all  dogmas  of  the  church  were  demonstrable  from  innate  first 
principles,  and  Anselm,  while  demanding  first  of  all  a  surrender  to  the 
authority  of  the  church,  made  a  brave  attempt  to  realize  the  old  ideal. 
For  the  time  being  nominalism  was  rejected.  The  interest  in  conserving 
the  content  of  Catholic  doctrine,  and  more  particularly  the  interest 
in  theological  certainty,  were  against  it.  But  by  the  time  of  Thomas 
Aquinas  we  find  that  the  influence  of  the  this-worldly  ideal  had  made 
itself  felt.  In  philosophy  Thomas  was  only  a  moderate  realist,  and  by 
his  Aristotelian  principles  he  undertook  to  demonstrate  not  all  but 

1  Pensees,  IX,  19,  35.  The  content  which  Pascal  held  to  be  thus  accredited  by 
"the  heart"  was  nothing  less  than  the  whole  body  of  Catholic  doctrine,  including, 
though  he  probably  did  not  realize  it,  those  elements  introduced  by  speculative 
activity  in  the  course  of  the  development  of  dogma. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  21 

only  some  of  the  dogmas  of  the  church.  Other  doctrines,  such  as  those 
of  the  Trinity  and  creation,  which  even  Albert  the  Great  and  Bona- 
ventura  undertook  to  demonstrate,  the  faithful  were  to  continue  to 
believe  on  the  mere  authority  of  the  church.  With  the  system  of  Duns 
Scotus  the  progress  in  the  direction  of  nominalism  was  greatly  accel- 
erated. This  philosopher  still  clung  rather  inconsistently  to  realism, 
but  in  his  emphasis  on  arbitrary  will  as  opposed  to  rational  determinism, 
he  had  in  principle  departed  from  it.  From  his  changed  point  of  view 
as  well  as  by  means  of  his  critical  acumen,  he  found  many  of  the  Thomistic 
demonstrations  unconvincing.  He  accordingly  held  that  the  number 
of  dogmas  demonstrable  by  reason  was  smaller  than  that  claimed  by 
Aquinas,  and  correspondingly  emphasized  the  authority  of  the  church 
as  the  ground  upon  which  they  were  to  be  believed.  With  Occam  the 
process  came  to  its  culmination,  and  the  victory  of  nominalism  in  the 
church  was  practically  complete.  For  Occam  and  his  followers  nothing 
but  a  persistent  concept  or  two,  a  few  still  venerated  relics  of  the  old 
realistic  metaphysics,  remained.  Of  the  dogmas  of  the  church,  while 
Anselm  would  prove  all,  Aquinas  some,  and  Duns  fewer,  Occam  would 
undertake  to  prove  not  a  single  one.1  All  were  to  be  accepted  in  implicit 
faith  in  the  authority  of  the  church.2  This  was  held  to  be  necessary 
for  theological  certainty,3  because  the  old  realism,  by  whose  metaphysics 
they  had  been  proved,  was  gone;  it  was  thought  desirable  too,  as  mean- 
ing a  revival  of  the  Franciscan  type  of  piety  with  its  absolute  surrender 
to  the  church,  and  at  the  same  time  increasing  the  solidarity  of  the 
church  at  a  time  when  it  was  greatly  needed  in  order  to  retain  control 
of  those  political  units  which  were  beginning  to  grow  restive  under 
papal  domination.  The  reaction  against  the  old  metaphysics  was  thus 
essentially  the  expression  of  a  religious  revival,  viz.,  a  revival  of  this- 
worldly,  ecclesiastical  religion.  At  its  best  its  interest,  as  that  of  Ter- 
tullian  and  Augustine  had  been,  was  in  sound  morals  as  well  as  sound 
doctrine,  and,  as  that  of  the  Franciscans  had  been,  in  social  service  as 
well  as  personal  piety;  the  sanctions  of  religion  were  used  to  reinforce 

1  Cf.  Ueberweg,  History  of  Philosophy  (Eng.  tr.),  I,  460. 

3  Perhaps  the  best  example  of  the  reaction  from  the  distraction  resulting  from 
unsucccessful  speculative  efforts  to  reconcile  the  content  of  a  traditional  theology 
with  a  more  modern  world-view,  is  afforded  by  the  case  of  John  Henry  Newman. 
For  the  sake  of  certainty  he  bowed  to  the  authority  of  the  Roman  church,  even  at  the 
expense  of  accepting  a  theological  content  more  repugnant  to  natural  reason  than 
that  to  which  he  had  previously  adhered. 

3  There  was  at  this  time  practically  no  dispute  as  to  the  content  of  Catholic  doc- 
trine; that  had  already  been  denned  by  the  church. 


22  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

the  demands  of  morality;  the  monk  and  the  missionary  were  the  benefi- 
cent agents  of  Mother  Church.  At  its  worst  its  interest  was  political 
power  and  other  temporalities;  its  agents,  the  obedient  tools  of  a  self- 
seeking  corporation;  its  means  of  coercion,  the  hope  of  future  rewards 
and  the  fear  of  future  punishments,  modified  by  a  traffic  in  indulgences. 
Of  the  new  order  in  some  of  its  best  and  many  of  its  worst  aspects,  the 
history  of  Jesuitism  affords  characteristic  illustrations. 

7.  In  its  theological  aspect,  Protestantism  was  initially  (and  many 
would  say,  essentially)  significant  as  a  protest  on  religious  grounds 
against  the  old  scholasticism  with  its  metaphysical  theology.  This  was 
due  in  a  very  large  measure  to  the  religious  leadership  of  Luther.  Among 
the  influences  which  molded  his  thought,  besides  his  deep  religious 
experience  and  the  circumstances  of  his  life,  the  writings  of  Paul,  Augus- 
tine, Bernard,  and  of  the  Nominalists,  Biel,  D'Ailly,  and  Occam,  played 
a  very  important  part.  Like  these  last,  he  too  reacted  against  the  ex- 
aggerated other-worldliness  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  carried  the  reaction 
a  step  or  two  farther.  He  preached  the  gospel  of  a  present  experience 
of  salvation,  as  opposed  to  a  mere  hope  for  the  future.1  He  regarded 
the  Christian's  faithful  discharge  of  duties  in  the  humblest  vocation 
in  the  workaday  world  as  of  more  religious  value  than  the  cloistered  life 
of  the  monastery.  And  in  his  reaction  against  the  metaphysical  structure 
that  had  been  reared  by  the  scholastics  to  defend  the  other-worldly 
ideal,  he  was  guided  by  a  more  definite  critical  principle  than  any  of  his 
predecessors  had  possessed.  All  that  he  could  and  must  assert  on  the 
basis  of  his  experience  of  the  saving  grace  of  God  in  Jesus  Christ  he 
asserted  and  defended  with  the  fullest  confidence.  But  all  other  propo- 
sitions about  God  he  was  inclined  to  regard  as  more  or  less  "sophistical" 
and  unimportant,  and  any  doctrine  which  seemed  detrimental  to  the 
purity  of  the  Gospel  of  the  grace  of  God  in  Christ  and  justification  by 
faith  alone,  he  rejected  most  emphatically,  regardless  of  whatever  argu- 
ments might  be  adduced  in  its  favor.  Of  the  content  of  his  theology 
it  was  required  (at  least  in  principle)  that  it  be  all  of  vital  religious 
interest.  It  was  primarily  and  essentially  a  confession  of  the  faith 
inspired  by  the  gospel,  not  an  analysis  and  synthesis  of  principles  and 
facts  available  to  all  men  alike. 

Luther  recognized  the  application  of  this  principle  more  clearly  with 

1  This  led  him  to  substitute  for  the  external  authority  of  the  church  the  internal 
authority  of  the  word  of  God  in  the  gospel.  Later  the  exigencies  of  controversy  and 
political  complications  led  him  to  utilize  in  religion  the  external  authority  of  the  Bible 
and  the  state. 


NATURE   AND  MOTIVATION   OF   THE   REACTION  23 

reference  to  mediaeval  scholasticism  than  in  the  case  of  the  older  dog- 
matic formulations.  As  against  the  scholastic  procedure,  beginning 
with  speculations  about  God  and  then  inferring  what  is  to  be  believed 
with  regard  to  Christ  and  salvation,  he  would  adopt  the  reverse  order. 
"  Begin  to  teach  and  preach  of  God,"  he  says,  "purely  and  solely  of 
Christ,  as  formerly  in  high  schools  they  speculated  and  played  with  his 
works  in  heaven  above,  what  he  is,  thinks  and  does  by  himself."1  From 
scholastic  argumentation  he  deliberately  turned  away  lest  he  should 
"philosophize  too  much." 

The  point  of  Luther's  special  attack  in  scholasticism  was  its  Aristo- 
telianism,  on  account  of  its  incompatibility  with  the  Augustinian  doc- 
trines of  human  inability  and  divine  grace.  The  chief  objection,  of 
course,  lay  against  the  Aristotelian  ethics,  but  certain  aspects  of  the 
metaphysical  doctrine  were  involved  as  well.  He  said  he  longed  to 
expose  the  shameful  character  of  that  comedian  (Aristotle)  who  had 
deluded  the  church  with  his  Greek  mask;  and  against  the  common 
proverb,  "Without  Aristotle,  no  one  can  become  a  theologian,"  he  put 
this  saying,  "No  one  can  become  a  theologian  who  does  not  become 
such  without  Aristotle."2 

It  was  primarily  an  interest  in  theological  certainty  which  led  Luther 
into  such  pronounced  antagonism  to  scholastic  speculation.  His 
theology  being  in  principle  the  expression  of  his  own  religious  faith,  his 
theological  certainty  was  identical  with  his  religious  certainty.3  All 
elements  of  theology,  therefore,  which  did  not  spring  from  this  religious 
assurance,  lacked  the  peculiar  certainty  which  belonged  to  the  former, 
and  to  introduce  them  into  a  theology  formed  on  Luther's  principle 
would  be  to  say  that  that  is  an  expression  of  one's  religious  faith  which 

1  Wakh,  VIII,  697. 

3  J.  Kostlin,  Theology  of  Luther  (Eng.  tr.),  I,  134. 

3  It  is  perhaps  the  most  fundamental  formal  difference  between  the  Catholic 
and  the  Protestant  theology,  that  while  the  former  is  essentially  an  instrument  (of 
intimidation,  if  not  of  torture)  in  the  hands  of  the  church,  the  latter  is  first  and  chiefly 
an  instrument  (of  self-help)  for  the  individual.  This  is  to  be  explained  as  follows: 
In  Catholicism  religious  certainty  (assurance  of  salvation)  is  denied  to  the  individual, 
except  provisionally  and  in  such  a  way  as  to  leave  him  absolutely  dependent  upon 
the  church;  while  the  church  has  sought  absolute  certainty  for  her  theology,  that  she 
may  retain  absolute  power  over  the  individual.  Religious  certainty  is  therefore  not 
essential  to  theological  certainty  in  the  Catholic  system.  In  Protestantism,  however, 
the  church  mediates  religious  certainty  to  the  individual  in  such  a  way  as  to  make  him 
independent.  The  certainty  of  the  theology  will  thus  depend  upon  the  certainty  of 
his  personal  faith.  The  theology  of  a  Protestant  is  (or  ought  to  be)  his  own  produc- 
tion. Strictly  speaking,  it  is  non-transferable. 


24  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

is  really  not  such  an  expression,  even  if  it  may  have  been  at  one  time 
the  expression  of  the  faith  of  someone  else. 

The  rigid  application  of  this  principle  to  the  ancient  Catholic  doc- 
trinal system  was  not  made  by  Luther.  Much  of  the  content  of  that 
theology  existed  in  a  form  which  was  utterly  foreign  to  Luther's  thought, 
and  could  not  be  made  the  expression  of  his  faith.  He  hated  the  term 
6/toovo-tos  and  felt  that  the  doctrine  of  the  two  natures  of  Christ  was 
not  a  matter  of  personal  concern  to  him.  And  yet  he  did  not  deny,  but 
accepted  as  a  whole  the  ancient  Catholic  creeds.  If  he  had  been  con- 
sistent with  the  principle  of  his  reaction  against  the  scholastic  theology, 
he  would  have  employed  the  radical  theological  method,  incorporating 
the  elements  of  the  ancient  creeds  only  as  he  was  able  to  assimilate 
them  to  his  own  religious  faith.  This  he  hesitated  to  do;  and  so,  having 
taken  over  externally  the  ancient  creeds,  and  having  returned  to  the 
external  authority  of  the  Bible,  he  committed  himself,  and  more  fully 
his  followers,  to  the  use  of  the  conservative  method.  The  controversy 
between  the  radical  and  conservative  method  in  Protestant  theology  is 
virtually  the  conflict  between  the  real  and  "the  whole  Luther." 

In  the  early  work  of  Melanchthon  the  religious  principle  of  Luther 
is  all-determining.  As  for  Luther  to  know  God  was  not  to  be  able  to 
reason  about  him,  but  to  have,  through  the  gospel,  an  experience  of  his 
love  and  saving  power;  so  for  Melanchthon  to  know  Christ  is  to  know 
his  benefits,  not  to  ponder  over  his  natures  and  the  mode  of  his  incar- 
nation.1 In  the  first  edition  of  the  Loci  Communes,  there  is  a  distinct, 
if  not  very  thoroughgoing,  application  of  the  radical  method.  The 
doctrines  of  anthropology  and  soteriology ,  in  which  the  religious  interest 
of  the  time  lay,  are  developed  at  length  and  on  the  basis  of  the  Christian 
believer's  assurance  of  forgiveness,  while  the  doctrines  of  the  Trinity, 
Creation,  and  Incarnation  are  passed  over  very  lightly.  Indeed,  any 
metaphysical  investigation  of  these  topics  he  seems  to  have  regarded 
as  unprofitable  and  dangerous.  His  interest  during  this  early  period 
being  primarily  in  that  content  which  was  of  vital  importance  to  the 
new  evangelical  piety  of  the  Reformers  and  which  possessed  a  peculiar 
inner  certainty  as  having  been  found  valuable  in  personal  religious  experi- 
ence, he  was  reluctant  to  introduce  any  other  elements  into  his  theology. 
The  special  value  and  certainty  attaching  to  the  former  content  he 
explained  by  referring  it  to  divine  revelation.  That  the  other  elements 
of  traditional  scholasticism  could  not  comfort  men's  hearts  he  regarded 
as  due  to  their  having  been  devised  by  human  wit.  Hence,  during  this 

1  Corp.  Re/.,  XXI,  85. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION        25 

early  period  of  his  domination  by  Luther's  thought,  he  avoided  meta- 
physics as  unnecessary  sophistry,  deliberately  turning  his  back  upon 
the  formerly  interesting  Aristotle,  and  expressing  the  opinion  that  the 
wisest  men  had  always  despised  philosophy. 

In  Zwingli's  theology  there  is  not  so  explicit  a  recognition  of  the 
experiential  criterion  as  there  is  by  Luther  and  the  Melanchthon  of 
1521.  The  Swiss  reformer  protested,  indeed,  against  putting  other 
doctrines  on  a  level  with  the  gospel,  but  the  gospel  he  interpreted  as 
everything  which  God  has  made  known  to  us  through  his  Son,  and  this 
in  turn  he  immediately  identified  with  the  content  of  the  Scriptures. 
The  result  was  that  while  for  the  German  reformers,  initially  at  least, 
the  principle  for  determining  the  content  of  theology  was  congruity 
with  the  evangelical  experience,  for  Zwingli  it  was  rather  correct 
exegesis  of  the  New  Testament,  facilitated,  however,  by  the  insight  given 
by  Christian  experience.  Thus,  while  Zwinglianism  has  a  radical 
aspect  when  viewed  in  relation  to  the  content  of  Catholic  theology,  and 
was  at  the  time  a  powerful  means  of  liberation,  it  was  nevertheless  in 
reality  the  conservative  method.  In  so  far  as  its  principle  was  made 
explicit,  it  undertook  to  determine  its  content  by  an  external  standard 
and  to  find  its  certainty  in  an  external  authority.  Still,  from  this  only 
mediately  religious  standpoint,  Zwingli  did  react  against  the  meta- 
physical element  in  scholastic  theology.  In  his  opinion  that  is  a  false 
religion  which  derives  its  knowledge  of  God  from  philosophy1  instead 
of  from  revelation.  There  is  no  assurance  that  it  will  arrive  at  the 
truth. 

In  Calvin  there  cannot  be  said  to  have  been  any  independent  reaction 
against  the  metaphysical  element,  as  such,  in  theology.  This  has  its 
explanation  partially  in  the  fact  that  he  was  converted  to  an  already 
existent  movement,  which  by  that  time  had  begun  to  emerge  from  the 
stage  of  mere  protest  against  the  old.  He  went  beyond  both  Luther 
and  Zwingli,  in  the  direction  of  a  metaphysical  systematizing  of  reli- 
gious knowledge.  But  while  it  was  the  conservative  method  of  Zwingli 
that  he  followed  in  determining  the  question  of  content,  he  nevertheless 
retained  some  of  the  effects  of  the  Lutheran  religious  reaction.  In 
particular  he  adhered  to  Luther's  principle  of  the  experiential  basis  of 
religious  knowledge  and  so  of  theology.  A  noteworthy  passage  in  this 
connection  is  that  in  which  he  says,  "It  does  not  signify  so  much  to 
know  what  he  (God)  is  in  himself,  as  what  he  is  willing  to  be  to  us."2 

1  De  Vera  et  Falsa  Religione,  p.  9. 

'Inst.,  Ill,  2:6. 


26  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

So  far  as  theological  certainty  is  concerned  there  was  an  important 
modification  from  Luther's  original  principle.  Instead  of  making  the 
certainty  of  religious  experience  determinative  directly  for  the  content 
of  theology,  in  which  case  each  article  of  theology  would  possess  religious 
value  and  certainty,  he  made  religious  certainty  (Christian  assurance, 
the  testimony  of  the  Spirit)  a  means  of  accrediting  the  Scriptures  as 
a  whole,  which  he  then  used  in  an  external  fashion  to  determine  the 
content  of  theology.  Religious  experience  was  thus  made  to  serve  an 
apologetic  rather  than  a  dogmatic  end 

But  while  Calvin  did  not  reject  a  certain  type  of  metaphysics  in 
theology,  he  did  most  emphatically,  if  not  religiously,  react  against  the 
heretical  results  of  the  introduction  into  theology  of  the  somewhat 
pantheistic  metaphysical  point  of  view  of  Servetus.  His  answer  to 
metaphysical  arguments  and  rationalistic  criticism  was  the  faggot  and 
stake. 

In  the  later  controversies  between  Lutherans  and  Calvinists  as  to 
the  place  of  philosophy  in  theology,  the  Lutherans  opposed  the  Cal- 
vinistic  way  of  introducing  philosophy  into  theology  by  admitting  only 
such  interpretations  of  Scripture  as  made  its  teachings  appear  philo- 
sophically possible.  It  cannot  be  said  to  have  been  a  distinctly  religious 
reaction,  however.  It  was  almost  purely  a  question  of  methodology, 
and  meant  an  extreme  externalism  and  conservatism  in  method  on  the 
part  of  the  Lutheran  theologians. 

Profoundly  religious  in  character,  on  the  other  hand,  was  the  Pietist 
reaction,  which  must  be  examined  presently.  But  between  the  Reform- 
ers and  the  Pietists  at  least  two  names — Hoffmann  and  Cocceius — deserve 
mention  in  this  connection.  Daniel  Hoffmann,  who  had  earlier  been  a 
professor  of  philosophy,  reacted  violently  against  the  scholastic  mingling 
of  philosophy  and  theology  on  the  part  of  contemporary  Protestant 
theologians.  He  insisted  that  religious  truth  was  attested  by  the  inner 
.  certainty  of  that  faith  which  the  Holy  Spirit  produced.  Not  to  make 
this  religious  and  divinely  produced  conviction  the  determining  factor 
in  theology  was  to  sin  against  the  Holy  Spirit.  The  opinions  of  phi- 
losophers on  matters  of  religion,  being  mainly  speculations  of  unregen- 
erate  men,  he  regarded  as  the  source  of  the  heretical  deviations  from 
the  truth  in  Arianism,  Scholasticism,  and  Calvinism.  Whatever 
philosophy  might  be  able  to  do  in  other  spheres,  in  the  realm  of  religion 
it  was  simply  a  robber.  It  was  also  an  anticipation  of  the  chief 
methodological  principle  of  Pietism  when  Cocceius  maintained  that  no 
one  but  the  Christian  believer  can  be  a  true  theologian. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  27 

Spener,  the  founder  of  German  Pietism,  undertook  to  call  the 
Protestant  churches  out  of  the  arid  intellectualism  which  would  sub- 
stitute the  theological  interest  for  the  practical  religious  interest.  This 
he  sought  to  do  by  restoring  the  original  state  of  affairs,  in  which  theology 
was  subservient  to  the  interests  of  vital  piety.  He  proclaimed  a  pro- 
found religious  experience,  produced  by  the  Holy  Spirit,  as  the  necessary 
basis  of  a  vital  theology.  No  one  but  the  regenerate  man  could  know 
God  aright  or  become  a  right  theologian.  Hence,  not  only  were  the 
hair-splitting  distinctions  of  the  scholastic  theologians  to  be  regarded 
as  for  the  most  part  of  trivial  importance,  but  especially  all  mixture  of 
philosophy  and  human  science  with  divine  wisdom  was  to  be  most  care- 
fully avoided.  In  Spener's  opinion,  philosophy  had  done  the  church 
more  harm  than  good.  The  philosophers  had  been  truly  called  the 
patriarchs  of  the  heretics.  First  of  all  Platonism,  and  in  later  times  the 
" heathen  Aristotle"  had  been  brought  into  theology  as  corrupting 
elements.1  With  respect  to  the  positive  side  of  method,  however, 
Spener  did  not  apply  his  radical  religious  principle  in  a  thoroughgoing 
fashion.  The  main  doctrinal  content  of  Protestant  orthodoxy  was 
uncritically  retained  and  unconsciously  made  normative  in  the  pietistic 
dogmatics,  which  aimed  at  being  a  simple  and  helpful  Bible  theology. 
The  movement  was  thus  an  attempt,  within  the  limits  of  the  conserva- 
tive method,  to  increase  the  immediate  religious  value  and  certainty  of 
theology,  and  this  by  eliminating  as  far  as  possible  all  non-biblical 
content  and  form  of  expression.  In  the  words  of  Francke,  it  aimed  to 
make  the  theologians  Christians,  not  to  make  the  young  Christians 
theologians.2 

The  influence  of  Pietism  was  far  reaching  and  beneficent.  This  is 
seen  especially  in  the  Moravian  movement  under  Zinzendorf,  which 
was  really  a  continuation  of  Pietism  at  its  best,  and  in  the  epoch-making 
Wesleyan  revival.  Both  of  these  movements  were,  as  regards  theology, 
conservative  but  anti-metaphysical.  Zinzendorf  evinces  little  interest 
in  speculative  questions  about  the  Trinity  and  the  God-man.  In  the 
spirit  of  Spener  he  protests  against  the  "vain  reason  which  does  not 
understand  what  is  meant  by  the  inbreaking  of  Grace."3  All  that  one 
can  accomplish  by  philosophy,  he  claimed,  is  to  perplex  oneself.  In 
Wesley's  thought  faith  was,  with  regard  to  the  spiritual  world,  what 
sense  is  to  the  material;  it  is  a  spiritual  sensation  of  every  regenerate 

1  Bedenken,  III,  370  f.;   IV,  184  f. 

2  Piinjer,  History  of  the  Christian  Philosophy  of  Religion  (Eng.  tr.),  I,  478. 

3  Quoted  by  Piinjer,  op.  cit.,  p.  282. 


28  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

soul.  Hence  reasoning  about  spiritual  matters  on  the  part  of  those 
without  this  spiritual  insight,  he  regarded  as  absolutely  futile.1  On 
this  basis  he  opposed  the  then  widely  current  doctrines  of  the  Deists, 
whom  he  designated  "the  Devil's  apostles."  Moreover,  as  against 
the  somewhat  scholastic  development  in  Calvinism  of  the  implications 
of  the  doctrine  of  election,2  he  reacted  vigorously  in  the  interests  of 
practical  evangelism.3 

The  age-dominating  reaction  against  metaphysics  on  the  part  of 
Immanuel  Kant,  in  so  far  as  it  affected  theology  and  was  determined 
by  religious  motives,  may  be  regarded  as  the  expression  of  that  relic  of 
pietism  which  he  retained  from  his  early  training.  He  sought  to  remove 
the  illusory  positive  knowledge  of  an  over-confident  speculative  theology 
as  well  as  the  illusory  negative  knowledge  of  its  sceptical  critics,  by  show- 
ing that  there  is  in  both  an  application  of  the  categories  of  the  under- 
standing and  the  regulative  ideas  of  reason  beyond  the  limits  of  actual 
or  possible  experience,  and  so  beyond  the  bounds  of  possible  scientific 
knowledge.  His  purpose  in  doing  this  was  that  he  might  make  room 
for  the  faith  which  postulates  its  object  on  a  practical,  ethico-religious 
basis,  and  which  is  thus  essentially  Christian,  evangelical,  pietistic.4 
His  essentially  conservative  religious  interest  is  shown  by  his  rejection 
of  metaphysical  theology  on  the  ground  that,  inasmuch  as  it  cannot 
prove  its  positions  and  issues  in  contradictions,  it  simply  arms  the 

1  Wesley  was  powerfully  influenced  by  William  Law,  who  discounted  the  religious 
function  of  reason,  as  only  able  to  help  man's  ignorance  "to  increase  and  fructify  in 
doubts,  fictions  and  absurd  debates."   Reason's  only  work  is  "to  be  an  observer  and 
comparer  of  things  that  manifest  themselves  to  it  by  the  senses." — The  Way  to  Divine 
Knowledge,  p.  51. 

2  In  Wesleyanism  a  more  immediate  religious  use  is  made  of  the  argument  from 
Christian  experience  than  in  Calvinism.     Calvin  tried  to  establish  religious  certainty 
by  means  of  the  doctrine  of  election.    The  "testimony  of  the  Spirit"  was  made  the 
basis  of  theological  certainty,  as  attesting  the  Scriptures,  through  which  in  turn  the 
content  of  theology  was  determined.     With  Wesley,  however,  the  "witness  of  the 
Spirit "  was  made  the  immediate  basis  of  religious  certainty.     With  respect  to  theology, 
both  content  and  certainty  seem  to  depend  upon  the  word  of  Scripture. 

3  The  New  England  theology  of  Jonathan  Edwards  was  also,  at  the  heart  of  it, 
the  expression  of  a  deeply  religious  reaction.     This  fact  is  reflected  in  such  declara- 
tions of  faith's  independence  of  external  support  as  the  following:  "The  gospel  of  the 
blessed  God  does  not  go  abroad  a  begging  for  its  evidence  so  much  as  some  think; 
it  has  its  highest  and  most  proper  evidence  in  itself." 

4  The  Scottish  reaction  to  common  sense  was  also  determined  by  religious  motives, 
but  it  was  a  reaction  against  empiricism  and  ultimately  to  metaphysics,  while  Kant's 
was  chiefly  against  rationalism  and  away  from  metaphysics. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  29 

enemies  of  theology  against  itself.  It  is  not  by  a  knowledge  of  the 
world,  he  insists,  but  by  moral  experience,  that  one  comes  to  a  knowledge 
of  God. 

But  in  his  theological  method  Kant  is  radical,  even  to  the  point  of 
a  moralistic  rationalism.  That  is  to  say,  of  the  content  of  traditional 
theology  there  is  to  be  admitted  into  his  system  only  that  which  he 
regards  as  having  religious  value;  and  inasmuch  as  religion  is  inter- 
preted as  the  viewing  of  duty  as  a  divine  command,  religious  value 
amounts  practically  to  just  moral  value.  Morality  is  moreover  inter- 
preted as  rationality  of  action  self-imposed  as  a  law.  Hence  religious 
or  moral  value  amounts  to  value  for  rationality  of  conduct.  It  is  the 
radical  method  in  theology,  with  a  principle  definitely  limiting  the  per- 
missible addition  of  content,  a  ne  plus  ultra  confining  theology  to  an 
exposition  of  religion  within  the  limits  of  mere  reason.  All  the  while 
the  certainty  attaching  to  this  content  is  prevailingly  moral  and  rational, 
and  it  is  the  securing  of  certainty  for  a  minimum  of  essential  content 
that  interests  Kant,  rather  than  the  conservation  of  a  maximum  of 
content.  This  essential  content  consists  of  postulates  of  the  moral 
nature  with  deductions  therefrom,  always  within  the  limits  of  the 
scientific  postulate  that  all  actual  and  possible  phenomena  constitute 
an  orderly  system.  The  single  exception  is  to  be  made  in  the  case  of 
that  content  deducible  from  a  postulate  whose  certainty — such  as  it  is — 
is  religious,  the'postulate,  namely,  that  the  perfectly  good  will  be  made 
perfectly  happy. 

But  the  Kantian  reaction  against  metaphysics  was  made  the  basis 
of  a  theology  much  more  conservative  both  as  to  method  and  content, 
than  his  own.  Of  this  use  of  Kantian  critical  principles  perhaps  the 
best  example  is  found  in  the  position  taken  by  Hamilton  and  Mansel. 
These  thinkers  were  interested  in  controverting  the  positivism  of  Comte 
and  especially  the  pantheism  of  Schelling,  Hegel,  and  Cousin,  both  of 
which  systems  were  beginning  to  make  themselves  felt  in  England  at 
that  time.  As  against  the  mere  science  of  the  one  and  the  science  and 
metaphysics  only  of  the  other,  they  advocated  the  claims  of  theology. 
Their  chief  significance  for  our  present  purpose  consists  in  the  fact  that, 
unlike  Kant,  they  were  more  interested  in  the  conservation  of  the  con- 
tent of  Christian  doctrine1  than  in  the  guarding  of  inner  certainty. 

1  It  is  interesting  to  compare  Locke's  rationalistic  superaaturalism  before  the 
evangelical  revival  with  Mansel's  agnostic  supernaturalism  after  it.  Locke  would, 
if  necessary,  part  with  all  the  peculiar  content  of  "revealed  religion,"  except  the 
doctrine  that  Jesus  was  the  Messiah.  Mansel  would  preserve  the  whole  content 
unimpaired,  and  so  must  keep  rationalistic  criticism  off  the  premises. 


30  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

They  adopted  the  negative  conclusion  of  the  first  Critique  and  used  it 
in  such  a  way  as  sacrificed  the  certainty  of  all  thought  about  ultimate 
reality.  Kant  regarded  intellect  as  liable  to  go  beyond  its  proper  limits; 
Hamilton  and  Mansel  held  it  to  be  impotent  to  do  what  is  demanded 
of  it.  By  reducing  all  possible  metaphysical  speculation  to  the  level 
of  a  sum-total  of  self-contradictory  propositions,  some  of  which  must 
be  regarded  as  true,  it  was  thought  to  give  credibility  to  even  the  most 
self-contradictory  propositions  of  traditional  theology.  In  the  case 
of  Mansel  especially,  knowledge  was  destroyed  in  order  to  make  room 
for  credulity.  According  to  Hamilton  science  deals  only  with  that  which 
is  conditioned  by  human  experience  and  thought,  and,  as  so  conditioned, 
it  is  only  relatively  true.  The  ultimate  truth  about  reality,  which  would . 
be  knowledge  of  the  Unconditioned,  is,  in  the  nature  of  the  case,  unat- 
tainable. The  attempt  to  reach  it  leads  one  into  a  maze  of  antinomies, 
such  as  that  the  universe  must  be  infinite  and  the  universe  cannot  be 
infinite,  of  which  pair  one  must,  and  one  only  can  be  true.  As  here 
there  is  a  philosophical  necessity  for  belief  of  the  inconceivable,  so  in 
theology  the  difficulty  may  not  be  due  to  the  content  of  the  revelation, 
but  to  the  limitations  of  the  human  mind.  Besides  there  is  a  practical, 
ethical  necessity  for  the  belief  in  an  unconditioned  Being  who  is  never- 
theless conditioned  because  related  to  the  world  in  some  definite  way. 
This  may  be  difficult,  but  no  difficulty  emerges  in  theology  which  has  not 
already  appeared  in  philosophy.  Less  interested  in  philosophical  pro- 
cesses for  their  own  sake  than  Hamilton,  and  more  interested  in  these 
negative  results  of  the  critical  philosophy  for  their  apparent  theological 
and  ecclesiastical  (if  not  immediately  religious)  value,  Mansel  went 
on  to  apply  them  to  the  doctrines  of  the  church  in  further  detail.  His 
most  far-reaching  deviation  from  Hamilton  is  the  repudiation  of  even 
our  moral  judgments  as  having  any  application  with  regard  to  God. 
Thus  reason  and  conscience  are  retired  in  the  interests  of  external 
authority.  The  critical  philosophy  has  its  only  value  in  enabling  the 
good  churchman,  in  spite  of  the  protests  of  reason  and  experience,  to 
believe  the  traditional  doctrine  imposed  by  an  external  authority.  It 
constitutes  an  apologetic  for  the  conservative  theological  method  in  the 
most  conservative  and  dogmatic  form.1 

1  Essentially  similar  to  the  reaction  of  Hamilton  and  Mansel  is  that  of  A.  J. 
Balfour,  who,  influenced  probably  by  ecclesiastical-political  as  well  as  religious  con- 
siderations, advocates  a  return  from  Naturalism  and  other  metaphysical  systems, 
none  of  which  are  ultimately  thinkable,  to  that  practical  use  of  religious  as  of  scientific 
principles,  to  which  human  need  and  instinct,  common  sense  and  social  authority 
all  alike  impel.  Thus  "a  defense  of  philosophic  doubt"  is  made  a  means  of  revealing 
the  true  "foundations  of  belief."  It  is  the  tu  quoque  argument  used  as  an  apologetic 
for  conservatism. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION         31 

Less  extreme  but  more  effective  was  the  transfer  of  emphasis  from 
intellectual,  metaphysical  processes  to  the  religion  of  the  heart  and  will, 
advocated  by  the  Swiss  preacher  and  theologian,  Vinet.  In  his  thought 
the  influence  of  Pascal  is  very  evident,1  although  he  did  not  emphasize 
the  opposition  of  faith  and  reason  so  strongly  as  did  his  predecessor. 
His  sensitive,  religious  soul  turned  away  with  aversion  from  all  move- 
ments tending  to  transform  religion  into  philosophy.  He  would  have 
nothing  to  do  with  rationalism,  which  he  found  not  only  in  its  sceptical 
variety,  but  also  as  unconsciously  present  in  the  intellectualism  of  the 
orthodox  dogmatics.  The  human  heart  he  held  to  be  naturally  reli- 
gious; it  is  by  the  heart  that  the  gospel  is  understood.  And  mere  meta- 
physics cannot  arrive  at  the  God  of  religious  knowledge.  It  can  supply 
neither  the  essential  content  nor  the  requisite  certainty.  It  was  in 
religious  certainty — a  certainty  satisfying  the  needs  of  the  religious 
nature — together  with  the  conservation  of  whatever  was  essential  to 
vital  (i.e.,  moral)  Christianity  that  Vinet  was  interested,  and  not  in  the 
retention  of  the  content  of  traditional  Christian  doctrine  as  a  whole. 
Thus  in  principle  he  had  adopted  the  radical  method,  although  in  actual 
procedure  he  continued  to  travel  with  much  difficulty  the  conservative 
way,  subtracting  what  content  he  could  not  retain,  until,  toward  the 
close  of  his  life,  in  drawing  up  a  summary  of  the  faith  of  the  new  Free 
Church,  his  emphasis  on  the  essential  religio-ethical  content  of  Chris- 
tianity and  on  that  alone  shows  that  he  was  finally  brought  to  a  con- 
sciousness of  the  method  appropriate  to  his  cherished  principle  of 
internality. 

In  America  Alexander  Campbell,  the  founder  of  the  " Church  of  the 
Disciples"  reacted,  in  the  interests  of  a  legalistic  type  of  Christian  piety, 
not  only  against  the  "natural  religion"  of  the  Deists,2  but  also  and 
chiefly  against  the  subtle  distinctions  of  an  orthodox  dogmatics  which 
was  not  content  to  "speak  of  Bible  things  in  Bible  words,"  and  so  was 
to  be  regarded  as  mainly  setting  forth  mere  human  opinion — the  prod- 
uct of  philosophical  speculation.3  His  main  interest  was  in  the  union 
of  all  Christians  as  a  means  of  converting  the  world  by  convincing  them 
of  the  truth  of  Christianity.4  One  of  the  chief  causes  of  division  was  the 
scholastic  type  of  theology,  which  was  accordingly  to  be  forsaken  for 
a  theology  which  should  find  in  Bible  statements  not  only  its  whole 

'The  influence  of  Kant,  De  Wette,  and  Schleiermacher  is  also  visible. 
3  W.  E.  Garrison,  The  Theology  of  Alexander  Campbell,  pp.  109,  no. 

3  Campbell,  Christianity  Restored,  pp.  5,  7,  9,  n,  124-26. 

4  Ibid.,  p.  103. 


32  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

content,  but  also  its  sole  basis  of  certainty.1  The  Bible  in  turn  he 
regarded  as  accredited  by  miracle  and  prophecy  so  completely  that 
any  one  statement  in  it  was  quite  as  credible  as  any  other.2  His  theo- 
logical method  was  thus  emphatically  conservative,  even  to  the  practical 
exclusion  of  all  appeal  to  the  Christian  consciousness.3 

One  more  theologian  may  be  mentioned  in  this  connection.  Horace 
Bushnell,  reacting  against  the  intellectualistic  orthodoxy  of  Taylor  and 
others  who  regarded  the  stale  products  of  bygone  metaphysics  as  the 
revealed  truth  of  God,  and  against  the  rationalistic  criticism  of  the 
Unitarians,  learned  to  place  his  chief  dependence  upon  insight  and 
experience.  There  had  been  a  sceptical  stage  in  his  thinking,  and  from 
it  he  had  emerged  by  following  the  impulses  of  his  religious  nature.  What 
was  so  profoundly  felt  must  surely  be  real.  In  coming  to  the  principle 
of  inner  certainty  he  was  greatly  helped  by  Coleridge,  who  believed  the 
biblical  revelation  divine  because  it  found  him;  while  Coleridge  had 
learned  this  from  Jacobi,  and  he  in  turn  from  Rousseau  and  Pascal. 
Having  adopted  his  radical  principle  of  internality,  Bushnell  proceeded 
in  the  conservative  direction,  seeking  in  his  theology  to  formulate 
Christian  experience.  He  had  little  sympathy  with  the  metaphysical 
elaboration  of  the  doctrine  of  the  three  persons  in  the  Godhead;  but 
on  the  other  hand,  he  did  not  go  over  to  Unitarianism,  for  while  "there 
was  enough  to  flee  from,"  there  was  "not  enough  to  go  to."4 

8.  We  shall  now  turn  to  a  theological  movement  of  the  latter  part 
of  the  eighteenth  century  and  the  early  decades  of  the  nineteenth, 
which  may  be  called  the  romanticist  religious  reaction  against  meta- 
physics. The  chief  names  in  this  connection  are  Rousseau,  Hamann, 
Herder,  Jacobi,  Fries,  De  Wette,  and  Schleiermacher.  These  men 
were,  as  theologians,  in  part  the  product  of  a  movement  which  was 
expressing  itself  in  the  philosophy  and  literature  and  life  of  the  time, 
in  part  independent  expressions  of  that  movement,  and  in  part  influen- 
tial causes  in  the  further  development  of  the  same.  Romanticism 

1  Campbell,  op.  cit.  Campbell  was  greatly  influenced  not  only  by  the  Lockian  transfer 
of  emphasis  from  constructive  metaphysics  to  the  problem  of  knowledge,  sensational- 
istically  developed  (see  W.  E.  Garrison,  op.  cit.,  passim),  but  also,  one  would  conjecture, 
by  Locke's  reduction  of  the  essential  content  of  Christian  faith  to  a  belief  that  Jesus 
is  the  Christ.    This  for  Campbell  was  the  only  "faith"  required  of  the  candidate  for 
fellowship  in  the  Christian  community.     But  of  theology  the  content  was,  theoretically, 
the  whole  body  of  New  Testament  teaching. 

2  Ibid.,  pp.  115,  116,  364. 

*  Ibid.,  p.  5;  Christian  Baptism,  p.  286. 

4  T.  T.  Munger,  Life  and  Letters  of  Horace  Bushnell,  p.  404. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  33 

was  a  revolt  against  the  intellectualism  which  increasingly  since  the 
Renaissance  had  sought  to  imprison  the  life  of  the  modern  world  within 
the  confines  of  classic  forms  of  thought.  It  viewed  with  an  almost 
naive  delight  every  expression  of  spontaneity,  every  indication  of  origi- 
nality; in  fact  nothing  human  was  alien  to  its  interest,  except  the  more 
habitual  and  mechanical  modes  of  human  thinking.  As  applied  to 
religion  it  meant  an  emphasis  upon  the  instinctive,  impulsive,  and  emo- 
tional phases,  as  opposed  to  the  intellectualism  of  conservative  dogma- 
tism on  the  one  hand  and  of  critical  rationalism  on  the  other.1  It  was 
this  radical  humanism  which,  in  the  main,  characterized  the  theological 
thinkers  here  classified  as  romanticists,  as  opposed  to  the  strictly  and 
strongly  evangelical  Christian  interest  of  those  discussed  in  the  pre- 
ceding section. 

The  forerunner  of  romanticism  was  Rousseau.  In  religion,  as  in 
education  and  politics,  he  advocated  returning  from  the  conventions 
of  society  to  the  uncorrupted  life  of  Nature.  He  had  been  powerfully 
enough  influenced  by  deistic  rationalism  to  find  no  sufficient  basis  of 
religious  certainty  in  external  authority  of  church  or  of  Bible,  and  the 
major  portion  of  the  content  of  orthodox  Catholicism  and  Protestantism 
was  distasteful  to  him,  with  his  genial  view  of  human  nature  and  his 
easy-going  attitude  toward  life.  But  he  was  interested  in  the  funda- 
mental principles  of  theism,  and  for  these  he  sought  a  soul-satisfying 
certainty.  He  had  no  confidence,  however,  in  the  rationalistic  or  any 
other  type  of  philosophy  as  a  means  of  accrediting  religious  faith. 
Accordingly  he  consulted  the  inner  light  and  resolved  to  admit  as  evi- 
dent all  those  beliefs  and  only  those  to  which  in  the  sincerity  of  his  heart 
he  could  not  refuse  his  consent.  This  meant  the  adoption  of  the  radical 
method,  and  that  in  its  radical  form,  since  there  was  no  distinct  purpose 
to  conserve  the  whole  essential  content  of  Christian  faith.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  however,  the  gospel,  as  Rousseau  understood  it,  found  place  in 
his  theology,  because  it  spoke  to  his  heart.  And  yet  he  found  all  reli- 
gions good  in  proportion  as  they  permit  and  encourage  the  worship  of  the 
heart.  "Keep  thy  soul  in  such  a  condition,"  says  the  Savoy  vicar, 
"that  thy  wish  is  always  that  God  exists;  then  wilt  thou  never  doubt  it." 

It  may  seem  strange  that  the  orthodox  Lutheran  and  ardent  pietist, 
Hamann,  should  be  put  in  the  same  class  with  Rousseau  and  others 

1  Cf.  Royce,  The  Spirit  of  Modern  Philosophy,  p.  173:  "Trust  your  genius,  follow 
your  noble  heart;  change  your  doctrine  whenever  your  heart  changes,  and  change 
your  heart  often.  Such  is  the  practical  creed  of  the  romanticists."  This  suggestive 
characterization  is  something  of  a  caricature. 


34  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

of  this  group.  But,  besides  the  fact  that  it  is  among  the  roots  of  the 
Romantic  movement  that  he  is  integrated  by  his  influence  over  Herder 
and  Jacobi,  there  is  something  even  in  his  advocacy  of  positive  religion 
as  against  the  impiety  of  the  philosopher's  abstraction,  which  he  calls 
"natural  religion,"  that  is  singularly  in  keeping  with  the  spirit  of  roman- 
ticism. It  was  in  the  concrete,  human  individual,  with  all  his  contra- 
dictions and  inconsistencies,  that  Hamann  was  interested,  and  not  in 
the  empty  abstractions  of  the  philosophy  of  the  understanding.  He 
recognized  and  valued  highly  "the  mystical  and  poetical  vein  in  all 
religions"  which  the  Illuminati  had  either  ignored  or  despised;  for  the 
ground  of  religion,  in  his  opinion,  lay  in  the  whole  being  of  man,  and  not 
merely  or  chiefly  in  that  most  contingent  and  abstract  phase  of  his 
existence,  his  power  of  cognition. 

Hamann's  reaction  was  in  the  interests  of  the  type  of  inwardly 
assured  religious  experience  which  found  expression  in  orthodox  pietism 
and  which  was  well  able,  he  judged,  to  stand  without  the  support  of 
philosophy,  and  even  in  the  face  of  its  attacks.  For  Spinoza,  Lessing, 
Voltaire,  Hume,  and  Kant,  he  manifested  supreme  contempt.  The 
theism  of  the  Aufklarung  he  met  with  ridicule.  Philosophy — "incom- 
petent, icy,  beggarly  philosophy" — which  is  nothing  but  the  product  of 
reflection  upon  those  words  which  are  used  to  symbolize  the  inexpres- 
sible realities  and  mysteries  of  the  soul,  has  for  its  God  nothing  but  a 
poetic  personification  of  a  purely  verbal  symbol. 

Hamann's  principle  of  the  inwardness  and  independence  of  religious 
certainty  might  have  led  him  to  adopt  the  radical  method  in  theology, 
but  in  his  reaction  against  "the  presumption  of  the  Aufklarung  that  our 
taste  and  judgment  should  be  the  test  of  the  divine  Word,"  he  was  led 
to  discredit  all  criticism;  and  so,  having  no  difficulty  in  accepting  the 
traditional  doctrinal  content,  there  seemed  no  occasion  for  departing 
from  the  conservative  theological  method. 

Herder,  who  was  very  fundamentally  influenced  by  Hamann,  differs 
from  him  most  significantly  in  making  antithetical  application  of  the 
same  principle.  While  Hamann  condemned  the  intellectualism  of 
liberal  theology  in  the  interests  of  conservative  Christian  piety,  Herder 
condemned  the  concealed  intellectualism  of  the  orthodox  system  of 
theology  in  the  interests  of  a  liberal,  somewhat  poetical  "religion  of 
man."  He  claimed  that  by  means  of  attempts  to  bring  the  doctrine 
into  a  closed  system  from  philosophical  points  of  view,  the  empty  images 
of  human  phantasy  had  penetrated  into  the  Christian  religion.  He 
advocated  an  historical  study  of  the  Bible  as  the  starting-point  in 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  35 

theology,  not  meaning,  however,  to  justify  thereby  the  use  of  the  con- 
servative method,  but  to  lead  to  a  deeper  appreciation  of  the  concrete, 
the  immediate  and  the  involuntary,  in  religion.  Christ's  religion  would 
thus  be  found  to  be  a  non-scholastic  religion  of  pure  human  goodness. 

Jacobi  had  received  a  pietistic  education  and  was  strongly  influenced 
by  Pascal,  Rousseau,  and  Hamann.  He  was  more  of  a  pietist  than 
Herder  and  more  of  a  romanticist  than  Hamann.  With  Herder  he 
opposed  the  intellectualism  of  the  orthodox  dogmaticians,  and  with 
Hamann  that  of  the  rationalists. 

"Jacobi  was  the  first  to  bring  the  opposition  to  the  intellectualism 
of  the  Aufklarung  to  scientific  expression."1  He  criticized  the  phi- 
losophy of  the  intellect  as  having  from  the  time  of  Aristotle  endeavored 
to  subordinate  immediate  knowledge  to  mediate,  whereas  immediate 
certainty  is  the  more  essential.  He  assumed  that  when  secular  phi- 
losophy is  self-consistent  it  leads  inevitably  to  a  monism  such  as  that 
of  Spinoza  or  Fichte,  whose  pantheism  is  virtually  atheism.  In  thus 
thwarting  the  needs  and  contradicting  the  immediate  conviction  of  the 
pious  soul,  philosophy  has  proved  its  own  incompetence. 

But  Jacobi  reacted  almost  if  not  quite  as  vigorously  against  the 
metaphysical  element  in  orthodox  theology.  He  was  never  satisfied 
with  the  traditional  arguments  for  the  existence  of  God,  and  readily 
agreed  with  Kant  in  his  critique  of  rational  theology.  The  mixture  of 
philosophy  with  popular  religion  had  made  of  the  Deity  a  monster  of 
many  contradictions,  which  tended  to  atheism.  Like  Hamann,  Jacobi 
would  have  nothing  to  do  with  a  God  who  is  the  mere  conclusion  of  a 
syllogism.  He  is  not  the  living  God,  and  a  God  that  can  be  known  is 
no  God  at  all. 

Thus  there  is,  according  to  Jacobi,  "no  other  means  of  safety  from 
the  steep  heights  of  metaphysics  than  to  turn  our  back  upon  all  phi- 
losophy and  throw  ourselves  overhead  into  the  depths  of  faith."2  It  is 
only  to  the  heart  that  God  reveals  himself.  Faith,  as  distinguished 
from  reason  (or,  in  his  later  terminology,  reason,  as  distinguished  from 
the  understanding)  is  a  sense  for  the  supersensible,  corresponding  to  the 
senses,  to  which  sensible  reality  is  revealed.  Intellect  has  a  merely 
logical,  regulative  function.  In  sensation  and  in  faith  there  is  an  imme- 
diate certainty  of  objective  reality,  whereas  the  conviction  produced 
by  demonstration  has  certainty  only  at  second  hand.  Here  the  interest 
is  mainly  in  certainty,  and  the  method  in  principle  is  radical,  although 
by  no  means  either  clearly  defined  or  consistently  applied. 

1  Piinjer,  op.  tit.,  p.  623.  2  Quoted  by  Piinjer,  op.  tit.,  p.  632. 


36  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

Fries  had  been  nurtured  in  the  Moravian  faith,  but  his  psychological 
studies  gradually  undermined  his  earlier  belief.  Later  he  was  power- 
fully influenced  by  Kant  and  Jacobi.  His  studies  in  the  Kantian 
philosophy  and  in  psychology  led  him  to  regard  knowledge  and  demon- 
stration as  belonging  to  the  realm  of  the  scientific  understanding  alone, 
according  to  which  nature  is  to  be  interpreted  as  a  mechanical  system. 
And  yet  all  proofs  and  knowledge  are  strictly  subjective;  all  that  can 
be  shown  is  the  agreement  of  immediate  with  mediate  knowledge.  And 
through  the  joint  action  of  the  lingering  influence  of  his  Moravian  piety 
with  his  later  study  of  Jacobi,  Fries  was  led  to  develop  on  the  back- 
ground of  this  theory  of  the  subjectivity  of  science,  the  further  view 
that  the  faith  which  rises  out  of  the  feeling  of  the  heart,  and  the  dogmas 
in  which  it  finds  expression,  may  also  be  regarded  as  valid,  inasmuch 
as  they  also  symbolize  that  reality  which  transcends  positive  objective 
knowledge. 

There  seems  to  be  in  the  development  of  this  point  of  view  some 
trace  of  the  religious  interest,  but  it  is  not  so  much  practically  religious 
as  it  is  colored  by  aesthetic  and  social  motives.  There  is  little  interest 
in  religious  certainty,  and  the  content  of  religious  belief  is  valued  chiefly 
for  its  associations  as  expressing  the  spiritual  sentiment  of  the  religious 
community.  Inasmuch  as  these  religious  ideas  are  not  held  to  have 
any  cognitive  value  within  the  world  of  the  understanding,  there  is 
practically  no  motive  for  revising  them,  and  so  there  cannot  be  said 
to  be  any  theological  method,  either  conservative  or  radical.  Only 
a  negative  theology  being  literally  true,  almost  any  symbolic  language 
may  be  tolerated.  As  for  metaphysical  mediation  between  the  ideas 
of  religion  and  the  concepts  of  science,  that  is  quite  uncalled  for,  as  the 
two  spheres  are  mutually  exclusive,  though  supplementing  each  other 
in  life. 

De  Wette  was  influenced  greatly  by  Herder,  but  still  more  powerfully 
by  Fries.  When  first  brought  as  a  young  man  into  contact  with  the 
rationalistic  historical  criticism  of  Paulus  he  felt  the  need  of  finding 
some  means  of  conserving  the  values  wrapped  up  with  his  religious 
ideas.  The  most  promising  device  seemed  to  be  that  offered  by  Fries, 
whose  general  view  of  religious  symbolism  the  younger  thinker  adopted 
and  developed  further.  Having  thus  silenced  the  protests  of  his  religious 
consciousness,  he  took  up  the  work  of  historical  criticism,  and  carried 
it  on  in  a  very  radical  fashion.  We  may  surmise  then  that  while  the 
religious  interest  was  really  felt  by  De  Wette  in  these  early  days,  the 
dominant  interest  was  the  scientific,  and  the  division  of  labor  was 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE   REACTION  37 

effected  as  much  as  anything  for  keeping  dogmatic  considerations  from 
interfering  with  the  scientific  accomplishment  of  the  historian's  task. 

De  Wette  criticized  rationalism  because  it  undertook  to  controvert 
the  doctrines  of  the  church  as  contradictory,  whereas  it  should  have 
been  recognized  that  these  doctrines  are  not,  properly  speaking,  products 
of  metaphysical  knowledge,  but  mere  poetical  symbols  to  express 
religious  feeling.  The  task  of  theology,  he  claimed,  was  simply  to 
attempt  to  show  the  original  relation  of  these  symbols  to  the  religious 
life  out  of  which  they  arose.1  To  attempt  a  metaphysical  mediation 
between  these  ideas  and  the  facts  and  laws  of  scientific  knowledge 
could  only  result  from  a  mistake  as  to  the  real  nature  of  religious  ideas.2 

Schleiermacher's  final  religious  and  theological  position  was  in  large 
part  the  product  of  a  series  of  successive  influences  of  widely  varying 
types  to  which  he  was  subjected.  In  early  life,  at  home  and  at  school, 
he  was  under  the  strongly  pietistic  influence  of  the  Moravian  brother- 
hood. Then,  through  his  contact  with  the  philosophy  and  theology  of 
the  Aufklarung,  he  reacted  to  a  thoroughly  radical  position,  rejecting 
much  of  the  content  of  orthodox  dogmatics.  This  radicalism  as  to 
content  largely  remained,  even  after  the  rejection  of  Illuminism,  show- 
ing the  still  powerful  influence  of  Spinoza  and  the  rationalistic  features 
of  the  Kantian  philosophy.  But  the  strongly  romanticist  atmosphere 
into  which  Schleiermacher  was  thrown  fastened  in  him  a  growing  revul- 
sion against  the  exaggerated  intellectualism  of  the  Aufklarung.  This 
found  expression  in  the  Reden  uber  die  Religion,  published  in  1799. 
Having  once  made  religious  feeling  rather  than  philosophy  determina- 
tive in  theology,  he  began  to  move  toward  a  more  conservative  position 
as  to  content,  although  retaining  the  radical  method  in  the  interests 
of  inwardness  and  certainty.  His  great  work,  Der  chrisiliche  Glaube, 
shows  that,  through  his  renewed  relations  with  the  evangelical  com- 
munity and  apparently  under  the  influence  to  some  extent  of  Jacobi, 
he  reacted  increasingly  against  mere  romanticism  in  religion  toward 
a  position  more  essentially  Christian  and  evangelical.  The  centrality 
of  Christ  and  the  normative  function  of  the  religious  consciousness  of 
the  Christian  community  are  more  distinctly  recognized  than  in  the 
Reden.  But  the  characteristic  thing  in  Schleiermacher  remained  his 

TSo  sympathetically  did  De  Wette  perform  this  task  that  the  young  Vinet's 
first  impression  of  him  was  that  he  was  quite  orthodox. 

2  An  interesting  revival  of  the  Friesian  philosophy  of  religion  is  that  being  under- 
taken by  Dr.  Nelson  and  Professors  Otto  and  Bousset  of  Gottingen  (Abhandlungen 
der  fries' schen  Schule,  Gottingen,  Vandenhoeck  u.  Ruprecht). 


38  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

revolt  in  the  name  of  religious  feeling  against  what  he  felt  to  be  the 
irreligious  principle  and  tendency  of  the  speculative  theology,  which 
was  being  revamped  on  a  post-Kantian  basis  by  his  antagonist,  Hegel. 

Schleiermacher's  reaction  against  metaphysics,  if  not  the  most  thor- 
oughgoing, has  been  one  of  the  most  influential  in  the  history  of  Chris- 
tian theology.  This  has  been  due  in  no  small  part  to  the  vital  interest 
in  religious  experience  which  everywhere  dominates  his  thought.  It 
was  for  the  purpose  of  making  the  religious  consciousness  more  inde- 
pendent of  foreign  materials  and  disturbing  influences  that  he  protested 
against  the  mingling  and  consequent  confusing  of  the  dogmatic  expres- 
sions of  religious  feeling  with  the  questionable  and  religiously  colorless 
propositions  of  "objective"  metaphysics.1  In  his  opinion  not  only 
rationalism,  but  scholasticism,  was  radically  mistaken  in  treating  reli- 
gion as  essentially  metaphysical  doctrine,  rather  than  as  the  feeling  of 
absolute  dependence  with  its  more  or  less  spontaneous  expression. 
Theology,  he  claimed,  was  thus  not  a  philosophical  but  a  descriptive, 
historical  discipline.  It  should  not  aim  to  set  forth  proofs  of  the  exist- 
ence of  God  or  a  speculative  formulation  of  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity, 
but  sympathetically  to  delineate  the  fundamental  affirmations  of  the 
Christian  believer  on  the  basis  of  his  religious  experience,  and  as  a  mem- 
ber of  the  Christian  community. 

9.  Of  all  the  religious  reactions  against  the  metaphysical  element 
in  theology,  the  Ritschlian  is  the  most  deliberate,  definite,  and  methodi- 
cal. The  history  of  Albrecht  RitschTs  theological  development2  in  its 
broad  outlines  is  quite  similar  to  that  of  Schleiermacher.  In  both  of 
them  there  was  an  initial  transition  from  the  conservative  method  and 
content  of  evangelical  orthodoxy  to  a  radical,  rationalistic  position, 
followed  by  a  new  appreciation  of  the  nature  of  religion  and  religious 
knowledge,  a  vigorous  reaction  against  intellectualism  in  religion  and 
theology,  and  a  growing  conservatism  as  to  theological  content.  In 
the  interests  of  inner  certainty  also  there  was  retained  by  both  of  them 
what  we  have  called  the  radical  method.  Ritschl's  break  with  conserva- 
tism was  at  least  hastened  by  his  contact  with  Hegelianism,  not  only 
through  Hegel's  own  works,  but  especially  through  the  direct  influence 
of  Erdmann  and  Baur.  This  philosophy  did  not  for  long  wholly  satisfy 

1  As  distinct  from  the  tentative  conclusions  of  philosophy,  whose  fundamental 
principle  is  radical  doubt,  dogmatics  builds  upon  the  certitude  of  religious  faith. 
Schleiermacher  felt  that  to  introduce  metaphysics  into  theology  would  make  the 
entire  product  of  this  amalgamation  tentative  and  subject  to  disturbing  doubts. 

2  Otto  Ritschl,  Albrecht  Ritschls  Leben,  passim. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION        39 

him,  and  while  unable  to  employ  what  seemed  to  him  the  unscientific 
method  of  such  conservative  theologians  as  his  own  father  and  the 
school  of  Hengstenberg,  he  nevertheless  felt  that,  so  far  as  vital  religion 
was  concerned,  they  had  the  advantage  over  the  Hegelians.  Probably 
the  most  potent  influence  in  leading  him  to  abandon  the  speculative 
method  for  one  more  consonant  with  the  evangelical  religious  interest 
was  his  intensive  study  of  biblical  theology  and  the  history  of  Christian 
doctrine.  He  gave  special  attention  to  the  Pauline  theology,  and  it  is 
significant,  in  view  of  later  developments,  that  he  seems  to  have  been 
particularly  interested  in  other  anti-speculative  theologians,  such  as  Mar- 
cion,  Tertullian,  and  Luther.  The  Pietists  and  Kant  and  Schleiermacher 
also  seem  to  have  had  more  influence  over  him,  and  his  own  position 
to  be  more  essentially  in  accord  with  theirs,  than  he  himself  recognized. 
The  vagaries  of  Pietism  he  severely  censured,  and  its  great  religious 
value  he  appreciated,  although  increasingly,  still  only  imperfectly; 
and  yet  as  against  intellectualism  in  religion,  whether  orthodox  or 
rationalistic,  the  Ritschlian  revolt  is  essentially  pietistic  and  continuous 
with  the  older  movement.1  Ritschl  was  not  altogether  unaware  of 
what  he  owed  to  Kant  and  Schleiermacher  for  helping  him  to  disentangle 
himself  from  Hegelianism,  and  he  acknowledged  that  in  respect  of 
method  Schleiermacher  was  his  predecessor;  yet  he  felt  strongly  the 
difference  between  their  views  of  the  nature  of  religion  and  his  own. 
Uniting  the  moral  interest  of  Kant  with  the  aesthetic-religious  interest  of 
Schleiermacher  (especially  of  the  Schleiermacher  of  the  Reden)  he  was 
able  to  be  truer  to  the  essence  of  Christianity  than  either,  and  to  criti- 
cize the  defects  of  both.  Indeed,  his  chief  advance  beyond  Schleier- 
macher in  theological  method  consists  in  the  fact  that,  on  the  one  hand, 
he  secured  an  increased  objectivity  and  a  conservatism  as  regards 
content  by  making  explicitly  normative  for  the  ideas  in  which  religious 
feeling  expresses  itself,  the  historic  gospel  of  the  grace  of  God  mani- 
fested in  Jesus  Christ  for  the  moral  redemption  of  the  world,3  together 
with  the  additional  fact,  on  the  other  hand,  that  he  accomplished  this 
without  any  loss  of  internality  and  religious  assurance.  .  Schleiermacher, 
however,  before  him  had  already  moved  a  long  distance  in  this  direction. 
His  own  dependence  upon  Kant  also  in  point  of  method  seems  to  have 
been  underestimated  by  Ritschl.  In  theory  of  knowledge  he  claimed 
to  stand  with  Lotze  rather  than  with  Kant,  but  it  was  really  after  he 
had  found  his  theological  position  that  he  gave  much  attention  to 

1  Cf.  Gustav  Ecke,  Die  theologische  Schule  Albrecht  RitsMs,  I,  25-32. 

2  Cf.  F.  Kattenbusch,  Von  Schleiermacher  zu  Ritschl. 


40  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

Lotze's  epistemology,1  and  his  own  system  was  not  radically  affected 
thereby.  Moreover,  he  interpreted  Lotze  in  a  somewhat  Kantian  sense, 
and  Kant,  after  the  manner  of  Locke;  and,  Ritschl  himself  to  the  con- 
trary notwithstanding,  the  subsequent  history  of  thought  has  shown 
the  Ritschlian  principle  to  be  more  fundamentally  at  one  with  the 
Kantian  than  with  the  Lotzian  philosophy.2 

Ritschl's  reaction,  as  has  been  suggested,  was  primarily  a  revolt  of 
the  Christian  consciousness  against  the  pantheism  of  the  Hegelian 
monistic  idealism.  Vital  convictions  as  to  the  personality  of  God  and 
the  reality  of  sin  and  salvation  were  felt  to  be  imperiled  by  the  specu- 
lative doctrine  of  the  Absolute.  Ritschl  came  to  look  upon  the  God  of 
contemporary  philosophy  as  merely  the  generic  concept  of  a  thing, 
personified  and  deified — in  reality  nothing  but  the  mental  shadow- 
picture  of  the  world.  "The  Absolute!"  he  exclaimed,  "How  sublime 
the  sound!  Dimly  only  do  I  remember  that  this  word  occupied  my 
thoughts  in  youth,  when  the  Hegelian  terminology  threatened  to  draw 
me  as  well  as  others  into  its  vortex.  That  was  a  long  time  ago,  and  the 
word  has  become  strange  to  me,  since  I  found  in  it  no  fruitful  thought."3 
But  religion  was  not  alone  in  ite  reaction  against  the  despotic  domination 
of  the  Hegelian  Absolute.  Science  also  had  rebelled,  and  where  Chris- 
tian faith  did  not  exist  it  was  a  naturalistic  empiricism  which  had  dis- 
placed the  now  thoroughly  discredited  speculative  philosophy.  It  was 
this  that  Ritschl  had  to  confront.  In  the  social  situation,  therefore, 
as  well  as  in  his  own  individual  history,  Ritschl's  theology  was  an  essen- 
tially conservative  movement.  It  aimed  to  retain  unimpaired  the 
essence  of  evangelical  Christianity,  while  conceding  all  the  legitimate 
demands  of  the  scientific  understanding. 

And  yet  in  breaking  with  the  liberal  speculative  theology  of  the 
Hegelians  Ritschl  was  further  than  ever  from  returning  to  the  method  of 
orthodox  scholasticism.  In  the  first  place  he  could  not  give  up  his 
radical  method,  especially  because  of  his  interest  in  Christian  certainty. 
In  the  second  place  the  method  he  pursued  corresponded  with  the  pur- 

1  Pfleiderer  plausibly  suggests  that  Ritschl  probably  did  not  make  this  theory 
of  cognition  the  basis  of  his  theology  from  the  first,  but  rather  propounded  it  subse- 
quently in  its  defense  (Development  of  Theology,  etc.,  p.  183). 

2  Traub,  "Ritschls  Erkenntnistheorie,"  Zeitschr.  fur  Theol  u.  Kirche,  IV,  91  ff.; 
Schoen,  Les  origines  historiques  de  la  theologie  de  Ritschl;  Ecke,  op.  tit. 

3  Theologie  u.  Metaphysik,  p.  18.    There  seems  to  have  been  fundamental  to  the 
Ritschlian  movement  a  recognition  of  the  unsatisfactoriness  of  any  conceivable 
Absolute  of  philosophy  as  equated  with  the  God  of  Christian  faith.     So  long  at  least 
as  a  merely  static  world-view  obtained,  this  was  doubtless  true. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION        41 

pose  of  Luther  to  break  with  the  scholastic  theology.1  The  meta- 
physical element  in  the  older  theology  seemed  to  him  to  curtail  the 
value  of  the  knowledge  of  God  derived  from  revelation.  It  was  an 
addition  of  content  which  meant  a  subtraction  of  value.  Hence  he 
opposed  natural  religion  and  "mixed  articles"  in  theology.  The  tra- 
ditional proofs  of  the  existence  of  God  he  successively  discarded.  The 
combination  of  scholastic  ontology  with  mystical  psychology  he  felt 
had  rendered  the  traditional  theology  unintelligible  and  neo-Platonic. 

It  was  for  the  securing  of  the  "positive  and  proper  character  of 
theology,"2  the  conservation  of  the  gospel,  the  whole  gospel,  and  nothing 
but  the  gospel,  and  that  without  abandoning  the  radical  method,  that 
Ritschl  was  concerned.  He  sought  to  eliminate  from  ecclesiastical 
doctrine  all  alien  content,  whether  of  ancient  or  recent  introduction, 
to  retain  all  content  essential  to  the  expression  and  guidance  of  evan- 
gelical piety,  and  to  restore  to  the  believer  in  the  affirmation  of  that 
content  the  certitude  which  flows  from  religious  experience.3  With 
this  in  view  he  took  the  position  that  theology  should  consist  of  faith 
propositions  solely.  The  religious  world-view  is  based  upon  the  fact 
that  the  human  spirit  distinguishes  itself  as  to  value  from  all  other 
things  in  the  world,  and  expresses  itself  in  a  series  of  religious  proposi- 
tions which  are  essential  if  one  is  to  maintain  this  self -evaluation; 
when  properly  formulated  they  must  stand  or  fall  with  it,  and  it  with 
them.4  These  religious  propositions  are  thus  of  the  nature  of  independ- 
ent value-judgments,5  and  move  in  a  different  sphere  from  the  judg- 
ments of  mere  scientific  description. 

This  doctrine  of  the  value-judgment  is  not  the  only  ground  upon 
which  Ritschl  endeavored  to  justify  theoretically  his  exclusion  of 
metaphysics,  as  merely  theoretical,  from  its  former  place  in  theology. 
Indeed,  when  we  recall,  with  Wendland,6  that  Ritschl  attempted  in 
several  different  ways  at  different  times  to  find  a  theoretical  defence 
for  his  proposed  procedure,  we  are  confirmed  in  the  view  that  his  real 
motive  was  practical,  and  that  this  theoretical  consideration  was  origi- 
nally a  mere  after- thought,  devised  as  an  apology  for  his  method.  He 

1  Theologie  u.  Metaphysik,  pp.  18,  65. 

3  Justification  and  Reconciliation  (Eng.  tr.),  p.  17. 

s  Ecke  analyzes  (op.  cit.,  II,  16)  the  practical  interest  which  produced  the  Ritschlian 
movement  into  the  apologetic  motive,  the  ethical,  the  religious  and  the  ecclesiastical. 
These  are  at  bottom  one  and  the  same,  viz.,  an  interest  in  the  propagation  of  evan- 
gelical Christianity. 

4  Theol.  u.  Met.,  p.  9.  *  /.  and  R.,  p.  28. 
6  Albrecht  Ritschl  und  seine  Schiller,  pp.  46-52. 


42  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

simply  wished  to  show  how  needless  and  foolish  it  was  to  submit  the 
products  and  values  of  Christian  faith  to  a  tribunal  whose  judgment 
was  pre-determined  by  ideas  from  which  all  religious  faith  was  on 
principle  excluded.  In  accordance  with  this  purpose  constructive 
metaphysics  was  assumed  necessarily  to  have  a  dogmatic  a  priori 
method,1  on  account  of  which  it  was  to  be  rejected,  while  the  only 
"  metaphysics "  to  be  retained  was  general  ontology,  interpreted  as 
a  mere  analysis  of  the  categories  of  human  cognition,  and  so  as 
amounting  to  nothing  more  than  epistemology.8 

Professor  Herrmann  of  Marburg  was  one  of  the  first  of  Ritschl's 
disciples.  He  is  an  avowed  Kantian,  both  in  his  retiring  of  constructive 
metaphysics  in  favor  of  faith,  and  in  his  emphasis  upon  the  a  priori 
character  and  absolute  authority  of  the  moral  law.  He  values  Schleier- 
macher  for  his  having  shown  the  ways  whereby  science  and  religion 
could  each  allow  the  other  to  go  on  its  own  way  unmolested,  but  criti- 
cizes him  as  inconsistent  in  introducing  questions  of  cosmology  into  his 
theology.  Ritschl's  chief  significance  he  finds  in  the  fact  that  he  sup- 
plements Kant  and  Schleiermacher  by  showing  that  true  morality  and 
true  religion  are  inseparable,3  but  he  criticizes  him  as  not  entirely  exclud- 
ing metaphysics  from  theology  in  his  discussions  of  the  personality  of 
God.  He  shows  great  respect  for  such  religious  theologians  as  Tertul- 
lian  and  Athanasius.  He  is  in  substantial  accord  with  the  religious 
ideals  of  the  Reformation,  and  in  his  opinion  the  need  of  the  hour  is 
to  experience  in  our  situation  the  spiritual  emancipation  which  Luther 
in  his  day  achieved  for  himself  and  for  us.4  He  has  much  in  common 
with  the  early  Pietists,  and  even  more  closely  resembles  Jacobi. 

Like  Jacobi  in  his  assumption  first  that  Spinoza  and  later  that 
Fichte  had  evolved  the  only  consistent  metaphysic,  Hermann  seems 
practically  to  have  assumed  that  there  can  be  but  one  outcome  of  meta- 
physical construction  when  it  operates  with  the  conceptions  furnished 
by  natural  science,  viz.,  materialistic  monism.5  In  this  he  has  been 
influenced  by  F.  A.  Lange,  and  it  is  as  a  protest  against  taking  such  a 
metaphysical  synthesis  of  the  facts  and  scientific  laws  of  nature  as  ulti- 
mate6 that  his  protest  on  religious  grounds  is  so  vehemently  made. 

1  TheoL  u.  Met.,  p.  39.  a  Ibid.,  pp.  40,  41. 

3  Die  Metaphysik  in  der  Theologie,  p.  50. 

4  Communion  with  God,  passim;  Zeitschr.  fiir.  Th.  u.  Kirche,  1907,  p.  33. 

5  Cf.  O.  Fliigel,  Die  speculative  Theologie  der  Gegenwart,  pp.  259  f. 

6  On  this  point  see  Wendland,  op.  cit.,  p.  53;  Goguel,  Wilhelm  Herrmann  et  le  pro- 
bleme  religieux  actuel,  pp.  162,  172. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  43 

But  speculative  idealism  is  viewed  by  Herrmann  with  hardly  more 
favor.  He  regards  it  as  inimical  to  some  of  the  most  essential  elements 
of  the  Christian  point  of  view.  He  mentions  particularly  the  attitude 
of  resignation  it  tends  to  foster  toward  moral  evil  as  being  unavoidable 
and  a  means  of  ultimate  good,  and  the  very  different  content  of  its  God- 
idea  from  that  revealed  in  the  Gospel.1 

Nor  does  Herrmann  permit  the  time-honored  metaphysical  encrusta- 
tions that  have  gathered  upon  the  traditional  theology  to  pass  unnoticed. 
The  Aristotelian  conception  of  God  as  an  unmoved  Cause  of  all  move- 
ment, he  regards  as  really  setting  forth  the  fundamental  idea  of  the 
ancient  Greek  religion  of  an  unbending  and  impersonal  Necessity. 
The  fusion  of  this  idea,  however,  with  the  Christian  God-idea  under  the 
urgency  of  the  need  felt  by  the  early  church  for  an  apologetic  against 
the  attacks  of  pagan  philosophers,  while  excusable  in  view  of  this  cir- 
cumstance, has  led  to  unfortunate  results.2  The  early  reformers  also 
introduced  an  alien  element,  he  claims,  when  they  adopted  the  idea 
of  an  absolute  determination  of  all  created  existences.3  But  Herrmann 
does  not  mean  to  say  that  ideas  and  doctrines  which  were  originally 
thoughts  of  faith  rather  than  metaphysical  speculations  should  be  taken 
over  externally  from  the  apostles  or  Scriptures.4  He  acknowledges 
inner  authority  only.  His  religious  interest  is  strongly  conservative, 
but  his  method  is  nothing  if  not  radical. 

The  religious  motivation  of  Herrmann's  opposition  to  metaphysics 
is  everywhere  apparent.  The  religious  character  of  theology  must  be 
kept  unimpaired.5  As  against  rationalism  which  regards  theological 
propositions  as  universally  valid  because  the  whole  universe  is  a  reve- 
lation of  God,  for  Christian  faith  revelation  is,  strictly  speaking,  found 
only  in  Jesus  Christ;6  through  him  alone  do  we  know  that  there  is  a 
God,  and  we  know  the  nature  of  God  only  through  the  religious  experi- 
ence of  emancipation  from  guilt.  If  one  has  not  had  this  religious 
experience  it  is  useless  for  him  to  theologize.7  The  Aristotelian  God- 
idea,  when  tested  religiously,  is  found  to  be  defective,  for  it  does  not 
include  the  idea  of  providence,  and  such  a  God  cannot  awake  the  response 
of  Christian  faith  and  love.8  Even  Pfleiderer's  speculative  theology 
from  the  standpoint  of  Christian  faith  has  a  merely  pathological  interest. 

1  Die  Metaphysik,  pp.  17  ff.,  38  f. 

2  Die  Religion  in  Verhtiltnis  zunt  Welterkennen  und  zur  Sittlichkeit,  pp.  123-31. 

3  Die  Metaphysik,  p.  28.  6  Ibid.,  p.  76. 

4  Communion  with  God  (Putnam),  p.  353.  1 1bid.,  p.  17. 

5  Die  Metaphysik,  p.  8.  8  Die  Religion,  etc.,  pp.  124-26. 


44  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

As  regards  certainty  the  only  kind  worth  having  in  religion  or  in  theology 
is  that  which  grows  out  of  the  experience  of  moral  redemption,1  and 
the  only  universality  of  theological  propositions  is  that  which  comes 
from  the  universal  validity  of  the  moral  law.2  The  only  valid  apolo- 
getic is  the  leading  of  men  to  experience  the  saving  power  of  the  gospel.3 

Professor  Kaftan  of  Berlin  is  another  prominent  follower  of  Ritschl. 
His  early  evangelical  training  and  religious  experience,  together  with  the 
influence  of  his  teacher,  the  Aristotelian  Trendelenburg,  combined  to 
produce  in  him  at  first  a  theological  method  in  which  the  content  of 
confessional  Biblicism  was  set  forth  as  proved  by  Christian  experience. 
It  was  the  radical  method  employed  uncritically,  so  as  to  leave  the 
whole  traditional  content  practically  unaffected.  But  a  more  careful 
historical  study  of  the  Scriptures  and  of  dogma  showed  that  a  religious 
experience  does  not  necessarily  prove  the  permanent  validity  of  those 
forms,  partly  of  philosophical  rather  than  of  religious  origin,  in  which 
a  similar  experience  found  expression  in  the  past.  In  Christian  experi- 
ence by  itself  there  was  no  sufficient  norm  for  Christian  doctrine,  and 
so  a  readjustment  became  necessary.  Ritschl's  principle  of  the  Chris- 
tian revelation  or  the  gospel  as  the  norm  of  Christian  doctrine  afforded 
a  means  of  retaining  the  element  of  authority  which  Kaftan  felt  to  be 
essential  to  dogmatics.  But  a  new  difficulty  arose.  Formerly  Kaftan's 
theology  had  been  (or  at  least  he  thought  it  was)  empirical,  like  science; 
but  now  it  appeared  that  his  theology  was  dogmatic  while  his  science 
was  empirical.  How  could  conflict  between  the  two  be  avoided,  and 
how  could  philosophy,  interpreted  as  a  final  synthesis  of  the  empirical 
sciences,  find  room  for  the  content  of  a  purely  dogmatic  discipline? 
The  only  way  of  escape  seemed  to  be  to  give  up  the  Aristotelian  phi- 
losophy and  all  constructive  metaphysics,  adopting  instead  the  phi- 
losophy of  Kant,4  whereby  scientific  knowledge  should  be  limited  to  the 
phenomenal  world,  and  religious  knowledge  to  the  realm  of  revelation 
and  faith.  Thus  Kaftan  became  agnostic  and  positivistic  in  philosophy, 
and  the  most  conservative  of  radicals  in  dogmatics,  in  essential  con- 
tinuity with  the  reformers  and  the  pietists.5 

1  Die  Metaphysik,  p.  35.  2  Die  Religion,  pp.  273-81. 

3  Christlich-protestantische  Dogmatik;    Die  Kultur  der  Gegenwart  (Die    christliche 
Religion),  II,  623-24. 

4  Kaftan  regards  Aristotle  as  the  philosopher  of  Catholicism,  and  Kant  as  the 
philosopher  of  Protestantism.     See  Kant,  der  Philosoph  des  Protestantismus,  passim; 
and  Das  Christentum  und  die  Philosophie,  pp.  5  ff. 

5  On  the  subject  of  this  paragraph  see  article  by  G.  B.  Foster,  "Kaftan's  Dog- 
matik," American  Journal  of  Theology,  II,  802  ff. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  45 

Kaftan's  attack  upon  constructive  metaphysics  in  theology  is  based 
explicitly  upon  practical  grounds,  although  he  seeks  also  an  additional 
theoretical  reason  for  its  rejection.  These  practical  grounds  are  two, 
viz.,  that  metaphysical  theology  is  inimical  to  the  content  of  Christian 
faith,  and  second,  that  it  is  unfavorable  to  Christian  certainty. 

So  far  as  content  is  concerned,  the  essential  is  likely  to  be  omitted, 
Kaftan  thinks,  and  the  alien  and  injurious  to  be  introduced,  when  an 
attempt  is  made  to  arrive  at  the  knowledge  of  God  through  the  knowl- 
edge of  the  world.1  Empirical  science  does  not  lead  directly  to  God, 
and  the  God  to  which  it  would  lead,  if  at  all,  would  be  a  nature-God, 
a  mere  seeming  God  (like  Aristotle's  thought-thinking-itself  and 
unmoved-mover),  not  the  spiritual,  personal  God  of  Christian  faith,2 
who  is  known  through  moral  experience.  Moreover,  the  attempt  to 
unify  in  a  final  philosophy  the  scientific  view  of  the  world  with  religious 
knowledge  of  God  has  been  uniformly  pantheistic  in  tendency.3  Of 
this  a  conspicuous  example  is  afforded  by  Hegelianism,  whose  logical 
Absolute  is  very  different  from  the  God  of  Christianity.*  But  even  in 
the  case  of  the  ecclesiastical  apologists  and  dogmaticians,  in  so  far  as 
use  was  made  of  current  metaphysical  concepts,  abridgments  and 
transformations  of  the  Christian  faith  resulted.5  Thus  "the  attempt 
to  apprehend  objectively  the  content  of  the  faith  involves  a  substantial 
alteration  of  it,  and  consequently  is  equivalent  to  an  injury  to  Chris- 
tianity."6 Therefore  all  that  is  not  of  Christian  faith  should  be  rigidly 
excluded  from  dogmatics.7 

With  reference  to  certainty,  Kaftan  makes  a  distinction  between 
the  religious  certainty  which  is  aroused  by  preaching  and  the  scientific 
proof  of  the  truth  of  the  Christian  religion.8  For  him  this  "scientific 
proof,"  or  apologetics,  is  really  nothing  more  than  a  technique  for  making 
a  religious  believer  satisfied  with  religious  certainty,  while  dogmatics 
is  the  presentation  of  the  Christian  truth  thus  assured,  in  an  exact, 
connected,  and  exhaustive  fashion.9  But  any  constructive  philosophical 
combination  of  apologetics  and  systematic  theology  is  to  be  avoided;10 
because  it  is  so  hard  to  unite  a  philosophy  based  upon  the  sciences  with 

1  Kant,  der  Philosoph,  etc.,  p.  15. 

2  Das  Christentum,  etc.,  pp.  5,  14,  etc. 

3  Drei  akademische  Reden  (1908),  p.  63.  «  Das  Christentum,  p.  23. 
s  The  Truth  of  the  Christian  Religion,  II,  413. 

6  Ibid.,  I,  119.        7  Ibid.,  II,  419.        8  Ibid.,  I,  10,  n.        » Ibid.,  pp.  10,  n. 
10  Ibid.,  pp.  141-46,  etc.;  Dogmatik,  §n. 


46  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

the  Christian  faith  in  God,  that  the  latter  is  made  hypothetical  in  the 
very  attempt.  Besides,  philosophy  is  always  ready  to  revise  its  judg- 
ments, and  holds  its  content  as  hypothetical,  human  opinion.  It  thus 
is  never  quite  inwardly  certain,  and  theology,  if  united  with  it,  would 
share  in  its  uncertainty.1 

Professor  Harnack  was  brought  up  in  an  environment  of  confes- 
sional Lutheranism.  His  attention  was  early  directed,  however,  to  the 
fields  of  historical  theology.  In  this  connection  he  came  to  some  extent 
under  the  still  lingering  rationalistic  influence  of  Baur;  but  the  chief 
factor  entering  into  the  formation  of  his  opinions,  apart  from  the  results 
of  his  own  historical  investigations,  was  the  already  influential  doctrine 
of  Ritschl.  The  new  emphasis  placed  by  the  Ritschlians  upon  the 
value  of  the  historical  element  in  the  doctrines  of  the  Christian  religion 
grew  with  Harnack  into  an  emphasis  upon  the  value  of  the  religious 
element  in  the  doctrines  of  historical  Christianity. 

His  interest  thus  came  to  be  primarily  in  content.  Himself  an 
exponent  of  the  radical  method  of  theology,  he  undertook  to  criticize, 
from  a  historical  standpoint,  the  content  of  the  conservative  dogmatics, 
and  to  show  the  necessity  of  subtracting  certain  elements.  Like  Marcion, 
Athanasius,  and  Luther,  he  is  interested  in  reduction,  simplification.2 
He  shows  that  while  gnostic  speculation  with  its  sudden  and  radical 
departure  from  the  essential  content  of  Christian  doctrine  was  promptly 
repudiated  by  the  church,  there  was  a  gradual  and  therefore  almost 
unnoticed  remodeling  of  doctrine  through  the  introduction  of  philo- 
sophical elements  by  Catholic  writers.3 

Thus  ecclesiastical  dogma,  while  having  its  certainty  still  in  the  gospel, 
derived  only  a  part  of  its  content  from  it.4  Consequently  such  formu- 
lations as  the  Catholic  doctrines  of  the  Trinity  and  the  two  natures  of 
Christ  are,  because  of  the  foreign  elements  they  contain,  extremely 
unsatisfactory  to  the  evangelical  faith  of  today.5  The  Lutheran  doc- 
trine of  faith  put  an  end  in  principle  to  the  old  theology  with  its  abso- 
lute metaphysics,6  and  since  then  the  gospel,  in  spite  of  retrograde 
movements,  has  been  pushing  itself  out  of  the  forms  which  it  was  once 
compelled  to  assume;7  but  the  problem  still  remains  of  freeing  the 
doctrine  of  the  Christian  community  from  everything  which,  in  order 
to  be  adopted,  requires  a  surrender  of  spiritual  autonomy.8  In  other 

1  Das  Christentum,  p.  25. 

2  History  of  Dogma  (Eng.  tr.),  I,  279  £.;  Ill,  140;  VII,  183. 

3  Ibid.,  I,  227.  s  Ibid.,  p.  244.  7  Ibid.,  I,  21. 

*  Ibid.,  p.  17.  6  Ibid.,  p.  226.  8  Ibid.,  VII,  240. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  47 

words,  the  task  of  the  hour  is  the  separation  of  the  "science  of  Chris- 
tianity" from  those  alien  accretions  which  have  been  combined  with 
it  in  the  course  of  history  through  metaphysical  speculation.  But  this 
question  of  content  is  not  for  Harnack  without  its  bearing  upon  the 
problem  of  certainty.  Not  only  is  the  speculative  method  in  his  opinion 
itself  unable  to  produce  religious  certainty,1  but  the  change  of  doctrinal 
content  by  means  of  speculation  was  naturally  accomplished  by  a  change 
in  the  character  of  the  religion  itself.  Instead  of  its  doctrines  appealing 
to  faith,  they  stimulated  curiosity  and  criticism.  Thus  one  of  the  most 
significant  results  of  the  "secularizing  or  Hellenizing"  of  Christianity 
which  in  Gnosticism  was  acute  and  in  Catholicism  more  gradual,2  was 
the  obscuration  of  that  religious  assurance  that  comes  of  laying  hold 
of  the  grace  of  God  in  the  simple,  unadulterated  gospel.3 

From  among  the  multitude  of  Ritschl's  disciples  but  a  few  more  can 
be  mentioned  here.  Brief  reference  may  be  made  to  Schultz,  Otto 
Ritschl,  Reischle,  Lobstein,  and  Sabatier.* 

Hermann  Schultz  in  his  apologetics  is  in  general  accord  with  Kaftan. 
He  does  not  undertake  to  defend  Christianity  by  metaphysically  proving 
the  rationality  of  its  doctrinal  content  or  the  reality  of  the  objects  of  its 
faith.  He  finds  the  method  of  Pascal  superior  to  that  of  Leibnitz.5 
No  proof  based  on  non-religious  foundations  can  be  successful,  for  mere 
theoretical  knowledge  cannot  go  beyond  the  causal  connection  of  indi- 
vidual things  in  the  empirical  world.  But  the  devout  man  has  in  his 
piety  an  assurance  which  is  for  him  not  inferior  in  strength  to  sensuous 
or  scientific  certainty.6  To  keep  this  religious  certainty  in  its  normal 
strength  is  the  function  of  apologetics.  To  this  end  its  chief  tasks  are 
first  to  show  that  science  can  never  disprove  the  Christian  faith,  and 
then  to  exhibit  the  practical  value  of  religion  and  the  religious  value  of 
Christianity.7  In  accord  with  this  general  method,  the  metaphysical 
doctrine  of  the  Deity  of  Christ  is  given  up,  Jesus  being  regarded  as  a 
truly  human  personality  whose  work  for  us  has  a  truly  divine  value.8 

Otto  Ritschl,  the  son  of  Albrecht,  undertakes  to  set  forth  the  com- 
plete and  independent  certainty  of  the  affirmations  of  Christian  faith, 
in  the  face  of  science  and  without  the  aid  of  metaphysics.  All  human 

1  Ibid.,  VII,  21.  a  Ibid.,  I,  226-27.  3  Mid.,  VII,  182. 

4  Professor  F.  Traub's  recently  published  Theologie  und  Philosophic,  is  in  essen- 
tial agreement  with  the  views  of  these  other  members  of  the  earlier  Ritschlian  school. 

5  Outline  of  Christian  Apologetics  (Eng.  tr.),  p.  9. 

6  Ibid.,  pp.  82,  83.  i  Op.  cit.,  pp.  3,  83. 
8  Die  Lehre  von  der  Gottheit  Christi. 


48  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

knowledge,  he  claims,  is  by  means  of  value-judgments,  although  in  cus- 
tomary or  so-called  existential  judgments  the  feeling  of  this  value  has 
largely  disappeared.1  The  affirmations  of  religious  faith  are  none  the 
less  true  of  reality  and  should  be  none  the  less  certain  for  their  being 
value- judgments;  for  all  value- judgments  intend  to  be  true,  and  even 
the  "  existential "  judgments  may  be  mistaken.2  The  present  condition 
and  possible  future  developments  of  scientific  knowledge  should  cause 
the  believer  no  concern,  for  the  transcendent  realities  with  which  faith 
deals  are  absolutely  inaccessible  to  science.3  Besides,  the  conflict  of 
views,  so  far  as  the  Christian  world- view  is  concerned,  is  not  with  science, 
which  is  limited  to  nature  and  history,  but  with  the  world- views  of  other 
forms  of  religions.  Moreover,  this  conflict  is  one  which  is  to  be  settled 
by  religion  rather  than  by  the  scientific  understanding^  Those  who 
really  have  the  religious  life  and  experience  out  of  which  the  affirmations 
of  faith  grow,  are  as  sure  of  the  reality  of  the  objects  of  their  faith  as 
the  scientist  is  of  the  object  of  his  science,  and  he  has  no  need  of  further 
assurance  by  means  of  theoretical  proofs.5 

The  late  Professor  Reischle  was  one  of  the  many  exponents  of  Ritsch- 
lianism  who,  in  excluding  metaphysical  speculation  even  from  the  dis- 
cussion of  the  personality  of  God,6  applied  the  Ritschlian  principle  more 
rigidly  than  Ritschl  himself  had  been  able  to  do.  He  criticized  Lotze 
for  supposing  that  the  ideas  of  the  imagination  give  us  an  adequate 
knowledge  of  God,  and  for  attempting  metaphysically  to  defend  the 
idea  of  the  personality  of  God;  it  was  an  attempt  which  seemed  to 
Reischle  foredoomed  to  failure  and  thus  not  in  the  interests  of  Christian 
certainty.7  Biedermann's  Hegelian  principle  of  abandoning  "repre- 
sentation" for  the  forms  of  philosophical  thought,  as  giving  the  only 
adequate  knowledge  of  the  Divine  Being,  seemed  equally  illusory 
because  no  adequate  conception  of  "Absolute  Spirit"  is  possible.8 
Besides,  Reischle  felt  that  by  such  metaphysical  attempts  the  view  of 
God  essential  to  Christian  piety  is  liable  to  injurious  modification;  as 
when  the  supposedly  orthodox  Frank  set  up  in  the  place  of  God  the 
idol  of  Thought-existing-m,-through-and-for-itself,  and  when  Strauss 
rejected  the  belief  in  a  personal  God  because  of  his  inability  to  combine 
the  notion  of  personality  with  that  of  the  "Absolute."9  Only  by  par- 

1  Ueber  Werturteile,  pp.  13  ff.,  34. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  22.  3  Ibid.,  p.  24.  <  Ibid.,  pp.  33-35.  s  Ibid.,  p.  26. 

6  Cf.  Traub,  Zeitschr.fiir.  Th.  u.  Kirche,  IV,  91  ff. 

7  Erkennen  ivir  die  Tiefen  Gottes?    Aufsatze  u.  Vortrage,  1906,  pp.  19-26. 

8  Ibid.,  pp.  26-36.  '  Ibid.,  pp.  67-71. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  49 

ticipating  in  the  Christian  experience  of  faith  in  Christ  can  one  know 
with  certainty  the  "depths  of  God,"  the  almighty  holy  love  of  God.1 
This  knowledge  finds  utterance  in  "thymetic  judgments,"  expressions 
of  the  attitude  of  the  feeling-willing  self  to  its  object.2  Christian  dog- 
matics should  consist  entirely  of  those  thymetic  judgments  of  whose 
truth  and  revelation-value  one  can  be  certain  only  through  faith  in 
Jesus  Christ.3  An  exhibition  of  this  independence  of  religious  judgments 
as  related  to  theoretical  understanding,  together  with  a  demonstration 
of  the  practical  value  of  Christian  faith,  constitutes  the  only  and  suffi- 
cient apologetic.4 

Professor  Lobstein,  in  the  course  of  an  admirable  exposition  of  the 
Ritschlian  method  in  dogmatics,5  takes  occasion  to  criticize  upon  reli- 
gious grounds  the  method  of  metaphysical  speculation  as  employed  by 
orthodox  and  rationalistic  theologians.  This  apriori  deductive  pro- 
cess, descending  from  the  absolute  and  universal  to  the  relative  and 
particular,6  tries  to  substitute  intellectual  for  religious  certainty;  with 
the  result  that,  for  those  who  cannot  understand  the  "proof"  or  are 
able  to  detect  the  fallacies  in  the  argument,  all  assured  conviction  tends 
to  disappear.7  Moreover,  when  apriori  speculation  is  made  determina- 
tive for  theology,  a  deviation  from  the  content  of  the  gospel  is  to  be 
expected;  as  when  the  Hegelian  theology  issues  in  an  abstract  specu- 
lative pantheism  which  denies  or  osbcures  the  fundamental  truths  of 
Christian  revelation.8 

Sabatier  can  scarcely  be  called  a  Ritschlian  in  the  sense  in  which  the 
term  would  apply  to  most  of  those  mentioned  in  this  section.  He 
might  almost  be  classed  as  well  as  a  belated  romanticist  or  even  more 
appropriately  as  a  forerunner  of  the  new  "  religio-historical "  school 
which  has  come  into  existence  under  the  combined  influence  of 
Ritschlianism  and  the  comparative  study  of  religions.9  But  the  influence 
of  the  Ritschlians  as  well  as  that  of  Schleiermacher  has  been  very  strong 
with  Sabatier;  and  this  circumstance,  together  with  the  fact  that  he 
synchronizes  with  the  Ritschlian  school,  brings  him  most  naturally 
within  this  group. 

1  Ibid.,  pp.  36,  54. 

2  Werturteile  und  Glaubensurteile,  pp.  85-87. 

3  Erkennen  Wir,  etc.,  p.  71. 

4  Werturteile,  etc.,  pp.  112-17. 

s  An  Introduction  to  Protestant  Dogmatics  (Eng.  tr.). 

6  Op.  cit.,  p.  151.  7  Ibid.,  pp.  152-55-  8  Ibid.,  PP-  IS3-S5- 

9  Cf.  G.  B.  Smith,  Biblical  World,  1908,  p.  118. 


50  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

Sabatier  emphasizes  what  he  calls  the  subjectivity  of  religious 
knowledge.1  By  this  he  means  not  what  we  have  called  subjective  in  the 
first  section,  with  its  implication  of  uncertainty,  but  rather  what  was 
called  internal,  or  more  definitely  what  Reischle  calls  "thymetic." 
His  thought  is  that  religious  knowledge  does  not  come  into  existence 
apart  from  the  activity  of  the  subject.2  But  this  religious  knowledge  is 
no  less  certain  than  "objective"  scientific  knowledge  of  nature.3  Being 
one's  own  independent  judgment,  it  needs  not,  as  religions  of  external 
authority  do,  to  be  buttressed  by  a  system  of  scholastic  metaphysics.* 
Such  procedure  is  superfluous  for  the  pious,  and  would  be  useless  to  one 
devoid  of  piety.  Moreover,  for  theology  to  be  treated  as  metaphysics 
would  be  inimical  to  its  certainty,  for,  inasmuch  as  we  can  never  deduce 
subjective  religious  knowledge  from  objective  science,5  the  attempt  but 
not  the  deed  confounds  us,  and  leaves  us  in  a  state  of  doubt.6 

From  the  standpoint  of  content  also,  Sabatier  finds  metaphysical 
theology  a  thing  to  be  deprecated.  Orthodoxy  forgets  the  historically 
and  psychologically  conditioned  character  of  all  doctrines,7  and  still 
includes  in  its  confession  of  faith  injurious  elements  which  originated 
not  in  Christian  religious  experience  but  in  pagan  philosophical  specu- 
lation. Rationalistic  speculation  on  the  other  hand  loses  sight  of  the 
specifically  religious  content  of  the  dogmas  which  it  attacks,8  with  the 
result  that  it  "throws  out  the  child  with  the  bath."  Obviously  Sabatier 
is  radical  in  method,  but  faced  in  the  conservative  direction. 

10.  Earlier  in  its  beginnings  than  Ritschlianism,  but  not  yet  so  fully 
worked  out,  and  more  radical  in  its  reaction  against  metaphysics,  was 
the  movement  which  found  initial  expression  in  Positivism.  This  name 
is  derived  from  the  French  word  positif  meaning  matter-of-fact  as 
opposed  to  fictitious  or  speculative,  and  was  chosen  by  Comte9  to 
designate  his  philosophy,  which  deliberately  turned  away  from  the 
transcendent  and  the  speculative  to  the  phenomenal  and  the  verifiable. 
Comte's  Positivism  is  not  so  important  as  a  cause  of  later  development 
in  religious  thought  and  feeling,  as  it  is  significant  as  a  symptom  of  a 

1  Outlines  of  a  Philosophy  of  Religion  Based  on  Psychology  and  History  (Eng.  tr.), 
P-  303- 

2  Ibid.,  pp.  304,  307.  3  ibid.}  p.  303. 

4  Religions  of  Authority  and  the  Religion  of  the  Spirit  (Eng.  tr.),  pp.  342-57;  Out- 
lines of  a  Philosophy  of  Religion,  etc.,  p.  310. 

s  Ibid.,  p.  303.  6  Ibid.,  p.  314.  1 1bid.,  p.  338.  8  Ibid.,  p.  339. 

9  Cours  d'une  philosophic  positive;  Systeme  de  politique  positive;  The  Catechism 
•of  Positive  Religion;  see  also  Levy-Bruhl,  The  Philosophy  of  Comte. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION        51 

movement  which  would  have  come  without  it.  Comte  simply  felt  it 
coming  and  gave  it,  for  the  time  being,  a  local  habitation  and  a  name. 
Positivism  in  its  religious  aspect  represents  such  an  extreme  transi- 
tion as  to  be  either  the  development  of  a  new  religious  interest,  or  the 
growth  of  an  anti-religious  spirit,  according  as  religion  is  broadly  or 
narrowly  defined.1  It  is  the  change  from  other-worldliness  in  an  exag- 
gerated form  to  this-worldliness  exclusively.  It  is  the  product  of  all 
those  influences  from  the  Renaissance  down  which  have  been  tending 
to  make  this  world  more  interesting  and  the  personal  life  seemingly 
more  worth  while.  Especially  have  the  advances  in  general  scientific, 
and  even  naturalistic  and  relativistic  directions  made  the  supernatural- 
istic,  eschatological-messianic  features  of  Christianity  extremely  dis- 
tasteful to  many  minds.  In  the  case  of  Comte  the  revolt  from  the  old 
was  probably  more  radical  than  it  would  otherwise  have  been  because 
of  his  being  most  familiar  with  the  unreformed  Catholic  type  of  Chris- 
tianity with  its  unmitigated  mediaevalism  of  ideal  and  idea  and  its 
ill-cemented  combination  of  dogmatic  utterance  and  fantastic  specu- 
lation. Moreover  the  contemporary  socialistic  reaction  following  the 
individualism  of  Rousseau  and  the  French  Revolution  was  one  of  the 
most  influential  factors  in  molding  early  positivism. 

The  period  of  Comte's  activity  falls  naturally  into  two  divisions. 
The  first  of  these  was  devoted  to  the  construction  of  the  positive  phi- 
losophy, or  "the  making  of  philosophy  scientific";  the  second  was 
concerned  with  the  attempt  to  revolutionize  religion  by  means  of  the 
positive  philosophy.  But  it  would  be  a  mistake  to  regard  this  as  an 
afterthought.  Comte's  work  was  a  unity.  His  ultimate  purpose  was 
to  reconstruct  society  in  a  stable  and  satisfactory  way.  In  order  to 
accomplish  this  permanently  he  undertook  to  transform  the  religious 
ideals  of  the  people  and  bring  them  into  accord  with  other  departments 
of  modern  life.  To  accomplish  this  a  thoroughly  modern  philosophy 
or  world- view  would  require  to  be  propagated.  In  constructing  such  a 
philosophy  the  principles  of  empirical  science  must  of  necessity,  in 
Comte's  opinion,  be  all-controlling. 

At  the  very  threshold  of  the  positive  philosophy  we  are  confronted 
with  the  doctrine  of  the  three  stages  of  human  thought,  viz.,  the  theo- 
logical or  fictitious,  the  metaphysical  or  abstract,  and  the  scientific  or 

1  E.  Caird  points  out  the  radical  defect,  from  a  religious  standpoint,  of  the  so-called 
"Religion  of  Humanity,"  viz.,  that  its  object  of  worship  does  not  coincide  with  the 
Reality  upon  which  our  lot  depends  (The  Social  Philosophy  and  Religion  of  Comte, 
p.  134). 


52  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

positive.  The  theological  mode  of  thought  arose,  according  to  Comte, 
spontaneously  as  the  primitive  mode  of  interpreting  the  facts  of  observa- 
tion. But  when  doubt  as  to  the  existence  of  God  entered,  attempts  to 
prove  his  existence  were  made.  These  "proofs,"  however,  instead  of 
buttressing  the  threatened  certainty,  simply  state  the  doubts  anew  and 
propagate  them  further.  Now  this  endeavor  to  prove  the  existence  of 
God  marks  the  transition  from  the  theological  to  the  metaphysical  mode 
of  thought.  Such  work  is  essentially  an ti- theological.  Its  method  is 
critical,  not  dogmatic.  Metaphysics  is  a  vain  attempt  to  support  the 
fantastic  structures  of  theology  which  empirical  observation  increasingly 
discredits.  With  the  progress  of  inductive  science  metaphysics  becomes 
more  abstract,  seeking  to  explain  phenomena  by  abstract  substances 
or  essences,  and  events  by  final  causes.  The  final  stage  of  metaphysical 
thought  is  where  events  are  explained  as  being  caused  by  nature  and 
natural  causes,  instead  of  a  simple  description  of  the  laws  of  phenomena 
being  formulated.  Thus  the  metaphysical  stage  is  simply  transitional. 
Its  content  is  theology  modified  by  physics.  Its  value  lies  entirely  in 
its  critical  function;  in  so  far  as  it  is  constructive  it  is  but  the  disappear- 
ing remainder  of  theology.  With  the  death  and  burial  of  theology  the 
occasion  for  metaphysical  activity  disappears. 

As  a  substitute  for  all  theistic  religions  Comte  offers  the  "religion 
of  humanity,"  and  sociology  in  place  of  the  discarded  theology.  Human- 
ity, the  sum-total  of  all  human  beings,  past,  present,  and  future,  dis- 
places the  anthropomorphic  God  of  dogmatic  theology  and  the  color- 
less Absolute  of  metaphysics.  Immortality  is  subjective  only,  i.e.,  the 
great  and  good  continue  to  live  in  the  memory  and  affection  of  suc- 
ceeding generations. 

Comte's  revolt,  then,  was  against  the  whole  content  of  theology, 
none  of  which  possessed  or  could  possibly  be  made  to  have,  as  it  seemed 
to  him,  any  degree  of  certainty.  From  the  point  of  view  of  the  old 
religion,  his  method  was  radical,  therefore,  to  the  point  of  nihilism.  In 
this  respect  he  is  followed  by  perhaps  the  majority  of  modern  sociol- 
ogists. This  should  not,  however,  prevent  a  recognition  of  the  fact 
that  positivism  was,  in  its  primary  intention,  only  an  unusually  radical 
method  of  conservatism.  It  sought  to  conserve  political  and  other 
social  values  in  a  community  that  had  become  used  to  atheism  and 
revolution,  and  was  in  danger  of  having  to  choose  between  anarchy 
and  despotism.  From  the  standpoint  of  the  "religion  of  humanity"  or 
the  social  interest  religiously  interpreted,  positivism,  even  in  its  anti- 
theological  and  anti-metaphysical  propaganda,  meant  to  be  conservative. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION  53 

ii.  The  most  recent  and  most  radical  reaction  against  metaphysics 
is  the  movement  generally  known  as  pragmatism.  That  it  was  per- 
vaded by  an  anti-metaphysical  animus  from  the  beginning  there  is 
abundant  evidence.  In  his  now  celebrated  paper  on  "How  to  Make 
Our  Ideas  Clear,"  C.  S.  Pierce,  the  forerunner  of  pragmatism,  said  as 
long  ago  as  1878,  "  Metaphysics  is  a  subject  much  more  curious  than 
useful,  the  knowledge  of  which,  like  that  of  a  sunken  reef,  serves  chiefly 
to  enable  us  to  keep  clear  of  it."1  Professor  William  James  has  con- 
stantly charged  metaphysics,  especially  that  of  Hegelian  and  other 
forms  of  monistic  absolutism,  with  being  altogether  excessive  in  its 
claims;  it  is  unconvincing  in  its  processes  and  useless  in  its  results. 
"The  hollow,  unreal  God  of  scholastic  theology"  and  "the  unintelli- 
gible, pantheistic,  absolutist  monster"  of  Bradley's  and  Royce's  monism 
have  no  "cash- value"  in  terms  of  experience;  and  only  a  "vicious 
intellectualism  "  could  lead  to  such  thin  and  empty  abstractions.  Even 
then,  its  reasoning  has  no  coercive  certainty.  It  is  high  time,  he  claims, 
for  philosophy  to  abandon  metaphysics  and  transform  itself  from  a 
theology  into  a  science  of  religion.2  Dr.  F.  C.  S.  Schiller,  the  Oxford 
pragmatist,  in  his  earliest  published  work,3  while  standing  for  a  theistic 
pluralism,  still  protested  against  the  current  despair  of  a  theoretical 
understanding  of  the  meaning  of  life.  He  has  come  to  hold,  however, 
that  the  present  age  has  grown  "wisely  sceptical  of  philosophical  systems 
which  lay  claim  to  universal  cogency  and  profess  a  final  answer  to  the 
riddle  of  existence. "4  Any  metaphysical  system  is  a  mere  individual 
work  of  art,  whose  one  value  consists  in  aesthetic  satisfaction.5  The 
absolutist's  Absolute  is  inhuman,  impersonal,  and  even  mad;  it  has  no 
real  religious  value,  and  its  existence  can  only  be  maintained  by  falla- 
cious arguments.6  Even  Lotze's  monism  has  neither  scientific  nor 
religious  value.7  Professor  John  Dewey  antagonizes  the  static,  fatal- 
istic absolutism  which  says  to  man  that  his  strivings  are  already  eter- 
nally fulfilled,  his  errors  eternally  transcended,  his  partial  belief  eternally 

1  Popular  Science  Monthly,  XII,  301. 

2  See,  for  example,  The  Will  to  Believe,  p.  272;   Varieties  of  Religious  Experience, 
PP-  453>  455  >    Pragmatism,  p.  19;    Journal  of  Philosophy,  etc.,  I,  683  ff.;   II,  115; 
Hibbert  Journal,  VI,  725,  728;  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  pp.  46,  60,  and  chaps,  ii  and  in. 

3  Riddles  of  the  Sphinx  (1891).  «  Hibbert  Journal,  IV,  937. 

slbid.,  IV,  937,  338.  Cf.  Karl  Pearson,  Grammar  of  Science,  p.  17;  K.  Gordon, 
Journal  of  Philosophy,  etc.,  Ill,  365. 

6  Ibid.,  etc.,  Ill,  482;  Hibbert  Journal,  III,  85,  86. 

7  Humanism,  pp.  62-84. 


54  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS   IN  THEOLOGY 

comprehended.1  He  mentions  with  apparent  approval  the  view  that 
philosophy,  after  wandering  hither  and  yon  in  a  wilderness  without 
purpose  or  outcome,  has  finally  come  to  its  senses — has  given  up  meta- 
physical absurdities  and  unverifiable  speculations,  and  become  a  purely 
positive  science  of  phenomena.2  According  to  Professor  G.  H.  Mead, 
metaphysics  is  really  only  a  systematic  statement  of  certain  problems, 
and  when  in  any  case  science,  especially  psychology,  finds  the  solution, 
the  problem  (i.e.,  the  metaphysics)  naturally  disappears.3  Giovanni 
Papini,  the  Italian  pragmatist,  declares  that  pragmatism  contains  no 
metaphysics  and  is  hostile  not  only  to  monism  but  to  all  cosmological 
metaphysics;  for  the  pragmatist  the  classical  problems  of  metaphysics 
are  non-existent  and  senseless;  pragmatism  is  less  a  philosophy  than  a 
method  of  doing  without  a  philosophy .4 

But  while  this  wholesale  rejection  of  metaphysics  may  seem  icono- 
clastic, and  while  the  pragmatist  may  himself  be  a  radical,  pragmatism 
is  the  new  conservatism.  It  is  the  conservatism  of  the  radical  man, 
the  conservatism  of  the  man  who  would  otherwise  be  a  sceptic.5  Ideal- 
istic systems  had  been  elaborately  constructed,  but  they  "failed  to  be 
convincing  objectively,"6  and  were  now  suffering  disintegration  from 
within.  After  Bradley — so  it  seemed  at  least — it  was  scepticism  or 
pragmatism.  Apodictic  certainty  was  gone,  but  the  demand  for  practi- 
cal certainty  with  regard  to  life  postulates  was  still  insistent.  Intellect 
having  failed  to  afford  it,  recourse  was  had  to  will — the  will  to  believe. 
This  will,  in  the  absence  of  demonstration,  to  believe  what  was  felt  to 
be  humanly  essential  drew  to  its  support  the  doctrine  in  which  the 
essence  of  pragmatism  consists,  viz.,  that  experience  and  practice  deter- 
mine truth;  all  true  judgments  are  actually  or  potentially  useful,  and 
other  than  utility  there  is  no  test  of  truth. 

Thus  while  conservative  in  its  initial  impulse,  pragmatism  is  radical 
in  its  method.  The  test  of  truth  being  its  function  in  human  life,  it  was 
a  natural  development  when  a  systematic  method  was  sought  not  only 
by  reducing  metaphysics  to  logic,7  but  by  making  logic  a  branch  of 

1  Philosophical  Review,  XV,  120. 

3  The  Significance  of  the  Problem  of  Knowledge,  p.  20;  cf.  also  Monist,  II,  17; 
Mind,  N.S.,  XV,  307. 

3  Philosophical  Review,  IX,  4. 

-» Popular  Science  Monthly,  LXXI,  351-58. 

s  Cf.  J.  B.  Pratt,  What  Is  Pragmatism?  p.  191. 

6  James,  Varieties  of  Rel.  Exp.,  p.  436. 

?  See  J.  Dewey,  Mind,  XII,  O.S.,  p.  88. 


NATURE  AND  MOTIVATION  OF  THE  REACTION        55 

psychology1  and  psychology  a  branch  of  biology.2  Among  the  instru- 
ments which  the  organism  uses  in  adapting  itself  to  its  environment,  in 
order  that  it  may  survive  in  the  struggle  for  existence,  are  the  ideas 
which  enter  into  the  judgments  made  from  time  to  time.  The  whole 
value  of  these  ideas  is  their  practical  value  as  "plans  of  action";  the 
truth  of  the  judgments  into  which  they  enter  is  their  utility  in  the  vital 
processes.3  Now  it  is  evident  that  the  particular  judgments  regarded 
as  true  on  this  basis  vary  to  some  extent  according  as  the  life-interests 
recognized  by  the  thinkers  are  different.  In  each  case  the  pragmatism 
is  a  method  of  conserving  the  values  already  cherished.  If  only  the 
interests  of  mere  physical  well-being  are  recognized,  all  conscious  life 
and  all  judgments  made  being  regarded  as  subservient  thereto;  or  even 
if  the  intellectual,  aesthetic,  moral,  and  social  interests  are  recognized 
as  ends,  and  only  the  distinctly  religious  interest  is  repudiated,  the 
position  of  the  pragmatist  will  appear  very  radical  and  revolutionary; 
but  even  so,  it  is  essentially  conservative  in  its  primary  intention.  It 
is  a  radical  method  of  conserving  the  values  recognized,  and  the  radi- 
calism belongs  to  the  life-interests  of  the  man,  rather  than  to  his 
pragmatism.  When  the  distinctly  religious  interest  (for  example,  the 
evangelically  Christian)  is  recognized  and  given  primary  importance, 
the  result  of  pragmatism  will  be  conservative  of  the  ideas  essential  to 
that  interest;  when  "a  sense  of  the  value  of  our  social  relationships," 
and  devotion  to  the  well-being  of  society  is  regarded  as  the  whole 
of  religion,  pragmatism  will  seem  radical  from  the  standpoint  of  the- 
istic  religion,  whereas  in  reality  it  is,  or  at  least  intends  to  be,  con- 
servative of  what  is  denned  as  the  essence  of  religion.  It  is  a  fact, 
however,  that  the  principle  of  pragmatism  does  tend  to  react  in  a 
radical  fashion  upon  the  content  it  was  designed  to  conserve;  only 
that  content  which  has  practical  value  has  any  assurance  of  being 
conserved. 

Some  idea  of  the  religious  or  quasi-religious  values  which  pragmatism 
is  employed  to  conserve  may  be  gained  by  examining  the  literature  of 
the  subject.  The  new  doctrine  was  first  promulgated  by  Professor 
James  before  a  theological  audience  as  a  method  of  settling  the  long 

1  J.  R.  Angell,  Relations  of  Psychology  to  Philosophy,  pp.  9-14. 
3  Angell,  Psychology,  passim. 

3  "Thought  is  'true'  when  it  meets  the  demand  of  the  concrete  situation  in  which 
it  arises;  when  it  brings  about  the  reconstruction  of  the  activity  out  of  which  and  for 
whose  reconstruction  it  is  born." — A.  W.  Moore,  The  Functional  vs.  Representational 
Theories  of  Knowledge  in  Locke's  Essay,  p.  67. 


56  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

controversy  between  reason  and  faith.1  He  protests  against  the  view 
that  the  heart  should  wait  until  all  the  evidence  is  in,  acting  meanwhile 
as  if  religion  were  not  true.2  He  stands  for  an  empirical  religious  phi- 
losophy and  not  only  claims  that  if  it  can  be  shown  that  the  notion  of 
God  fits  in  with  the  demands  of  life,  the  pragmatist  cannot  possibly 
deny  God's  existence,3  but  himself  strongly  favors  the  belief  in  "some 
form  of  superhuman  life  with  which  we  may,  unknown  to  ourselves,  be 
co-conscious.  "4  Dr.  Schiller,  while  disclaiming  that  pragmatism  explicitly 
endorses  any  sectarian  form  of  religion,5  says  that  religion,  with  its  idea 
of  God,  works,  and  is  therefore  true,  at  least  until  superseded  by  some- 
thing truer.  Professor  Dewey  long  ago  adopted  a  position  which,  in 
certain  of  its  aspects,  has  seemed  radical  from  the  standpoint  of  theistic 
religion,  when  he  advocated  the  reduction  of  philosophy  to  psychology, 
saying  that  consciousness  is  the  only  possible  Absolute.6  But  this  means 
that  for  the  "tough-minded  pragmatist"7  the  social  consciousness  is 
made  to  function  for  the  religious  consciousness  proper;  the  "religion  of 
humanity"  has  displaced  the  religion  of  God,  and  the  aim  is  not  to  con- 
serve the  religion  which  finds  its  practical  expression  in  soul-saving,  but 
that  which  manifests  itself  instead  in  efforts  toward  social  amelioration.8 
The  results  of  our  investigation  so  far,  then,  go  to  show  that  the 
reaction  against  metaphysics  in  theology  has  been  almost  invariably, 
in  its  primary  intention,  conservative  of  religious  interests.  On  the 
one  hand,  the  movements  antagonistic  to  the  metaphysical  element  in 
doctrines  traditionally  received  have  been  animated  in  the  main  by  the 
desire  to  regain  religious  certainty.  On  the  other  hand,  the  opposition 
to  the  vagaries  of  speculative  theology  has  been  primarily  for  the  preser- 
vation of  the  doctrinal  content  felt  to  be  religiously  essential.  The 
relative  justification  of  the  reaction  is  founded  upon  the  raison  d'etre 
of  vital  religion. 

1  Dr.  J.  B.  Pratt,  himself  a  critic  of  pragmatism,  says:  "I  think  I  shall  be  justified 
in  saying  that  James's  Witt  to  Believe  has  been  one  of  the  greatest  influences  for  genuine 
religious  faith  that  have  appeared  in  the  last  half-century." — What  is  Pragmatism  ?  p.  194. 

2  The  Will  to  Believe,  p.  29.  3  Pragmatism,  pp.  73,  299. 

4  Hibbert  Journal,  VI,  724;  cf.  also  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  pp.  in,  299,  300. 
s  Hibbert  Journal,  IV,  331. 

6  Mind,  O.S.,  XI,  17,  153,  164;  cf.  J.  R.  Angell,  The  Relations  of  Psychology 
to  Philosophy,  p.  20;    Dewey,  "The  Postulates  of  Immediate  Empiricism,"  Journal 
of  Philosophy,  II,  No.  19;   cf.  also  A.  W.  Moore's  statement   (Philos.  Rev.,   XIV, 
335)  that  there  is  no  ultimate  purpose,  but  only  purposings. 

7  Pratt,  op.  cit.,  pp.  250-51. 

8  G.  H.  Mead,  University  of  Chicago  Record,  1908,  p.  108. 


PART  II 

CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  ANTI-METAPHYSICAL 

REACTION 

12.  We  shall  now  turn  to  a  re-examination  of  this  historical  material 
in  order  to  learn  whether  the  results  of  this  reaction  against  theological 
metaphysics  have  been  altogether  satisfactory  to  the  religious  con- 
sciousness, and  if  not,  in  what  particulars — whether  as  regards  content, 
or  certainty,  or  both — it  has  been  found  wanting.  With  regard  to  the 
non-Christian  religions,  little  need  be  said  in  this  connection,  save  that 
especially  where  the  reaction  against  philosophical  speculation  in  religion 
was  unaccompanied  by  a  vigorous  cultivation  of  the  mystical  experi- 
ence, it  tended  to  issue  in  either  a  return  to  bare  traditionalism  with 
its  consequent  stagnation,  or  else  a  lapse  into  utter  scepticism.  We 
shall  turn  immediately,  therefore,  to  the  history  of  religious  thought 
in  the  early  Christian  church. 

So  far  as  the  New  Testament  thought  is  concerned,  it  is  a  fair  question 
whether,  in  view  of  the  outcome,  Paul  was  fully  justified  in  presenting 
the  Gospel  so  unrelieved  of  its  distinctly  Jewish  interpretative  concepts 
and  so  unmediated  to  the  gentile  mind  that  it  proved  "to  the  Greeks 
foolishness."  It  is  true  that  he  was  able  to  reassure  himself  with  the 
thought  that  "the  foolishness  of  God  is  wiser  than  men";  but  in  strong 
contrast  to  the  later  days  when  philosophers  accepted  Jesus  as  the  incar- 
nate Logos,  in  Paul's  day  it  had  to  be  acknowledged  that  "not  many 
wise"  were  called  to  share  the  privileges  of  Christian  faith.1 

And  among  the  later  New  Testament  writers,  those  who  fail  to  avail 
themselves  of  the  mediation  of  the  best  gentile  thought  are  the  ones  who 
have  to  meet  departures  from  the  content  of  Christian  teaching,  not  with 
refutation,  but  with  mere  denunciation.2 

Among  the  apologists,  Tatian,  who  so  violently  opposed  himself  to 
Greek  philosophy,  sought,  as  we  have  seen,  to  defend  Christianity  by 
bold  and  dogmatic  assertions.  The  perilous  proximity  of  this  dog- 
matism to  a  virtual  scepticism  may  be  inferred  from  his  representing 
Christianity  as  too  sublime  to  be  grasped  by  earthly  perception.3 
Both  Tatian  and  Theophilus,  unlike  the  philosophic  Justin,  found  them- 
1 1  Cor.  i :  23,  25,  26. 

2  See,  for  example,  II  Peter  and  Jude. 

3  Harnack,  History  of  Dogma,  I,  190. 

57 


58  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

selves  obliged  by  the  logic  of  their  position  to  ascribe  even  the  seeming 
truths  of  philosophy  to  the  devils.1  This  dualism  of  the  apparently 
true  but  really  false  and  the  apparently  false  but  really  true  was  scarcely 
ministrant  to  Christian  certainty. 

But  the  classic  example  of  this  epistemological  dualism  in  the  ancient 
church  was  Tertullian.  His  utter  repudiation  (at  least  in  theory)  of  all 
that  savored  of  human  philosophy  he  carried  to  the  extreme  of  declaring 
exultingly  his  belief  of  the  impossible  and  the  absurd.  He  taught 
that  nothing  is  to  be  believed  in  addition  to  what  belongs  to  Christian 
faith,2  and  declared  that  it  was  better  to  remain  ignorant  of  a  truth 
than  to  know  it  by  man's  wisdom  instead  of  by  divine  revelation.3 
This  extravagant  credulity  was  clearly  not  calculated  to  commend  itself 
to  the  thoughtful  as  conducive  to  religious  certainty;  and  his  Chris- 
tianity was  too  lacking  in  unity  and  convincing  power  for  the  content 
of  later  theological  thought  to  be  more  than  superficially  affected 
thereby.4 

With  Athanasius  independence  of  philosophy  was  not  only  his 
strength,  as  we  have  seen,  but  also  his  weakness.  It  saved  the  essential 
Christian  doctrine  at  the  time  of  crisis,  but  did  it  in  such  a  way  as 
created  difficulty  for  the  reflective  Christian  consciousness  ever  after.5 

13.  Among  the  historical  results  of  the  reaction  against  the  philo- 
sophical element  in  theology  we  must  reckon  the  "  double- truth"  theory 
as  developed  in  later  Catholicism  and  early  Protestantism.  A  partial 
anticipation  of  this  point  of  view  appears  in  the  many-sided  Augustine. 
Owing  to  the  negative  theology  of  the  philosophical  (neo-Platonic) 
element  in  his  thought,  he  is  led  to  say  that  we  know  with  certainty 
only  what  God  is  not;6  but  he  elsewhere  maintains  that  we  know  enough 
of  God  to  pray  to  and  love  him.7 

In  later  scholasticism  the  Thomistic  cleavage  between  what  is  above 
reason  and  what  is  according  to  reason8  widened  into  the  theory  of 
"  double  truth,"  according  to  which  something  might  be  true  in  theology 
and  false  in  philosophy,  and  vice  versa.  This  change  from  scholastic 

1  Haraack,  op.  cit.,  pp.  194,  200;  Theophilus,  II,  8,  15. 

2  The  Prescription  against  Heretics,  chap.  vii. 

s  Treatise  on  the  Soul,  chap.  i.  s  Ibid.,  Ill,  142;  IV,  49. 

*  Harnack,  op.  cit.,  II,  236.  6  De  Ord.  II,  44,  47. 

i  On  the  Trinity,  XII,  24,  and  passim. 

8  A  characteristic  expression  of  this  distinction  is  found  in  the  words  of  Bernard: 
"The  blessed  Trinity,  which  I  do  not  understand,  I  believe  in,  and  by  faith  I  hold  what 
I  do  not  grasp  with  my  mind."  Serm.  in  Cant.,  76. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  59 

rationalism  to  ecclesiastical  obscurantism  was  facilitated  by  Duns 
Scotus,  who  upheld  the  principle  of  arbitrary  authority,  and  said  that 
a  thing  might  be  true  for  the  philosopher  without  being  true  for  the 
theologian;  but  with  William  of  Occam  the  transition  was  practically 
complete.  According  to  this  teacher  there  is  probable  evidence  for  a 
First  Cause,  but  as  for  the  other  articles  of  faith,  they  are  not  even 
probable.  However,  the  will  to  believe  these  doctrines  of  the  church 
is  meritorious.1  Unreasonableness  and  authority  were,  as  Harnack 
says,  in  a  certain  sense  the  stamp  of  truth.2  It  seems  clear  to  them, 
that  even  in  the  form  in  which  it  was  most  favorable  to  ecclesiastical 
religion,  this  doctrine  of  double  truth  was  a  mere  makeshift;  it  sought  to 
relieve  the  otherwise  intolerable  uncertainty  of  a  theology  which  had 
felt  obliged  to  give  up  the  attempt  to  secure  a  reasonable  philosophical 
vindication. 

Although  this  theory  of  double  truth  was  condemned  as  sceptical 
by  the  Council  of  Lateran  in  1512,  we  find  that  the  reaction  against  the 
use  of  reason  in  matters  of  religion  led  Pascal  to  what  was  practically 
the  same  dualistic  position.  Not  only  did  he  hold  that  we  can  prove 
nothing;  but  contradictions  and  mysteries  became,  in  his  opinion,  wit- 
nesses for  the  faith.  The  more  flagrant  the  contradictions  and  the  more 
impenetrable  the  mysteries,  the  greater  was  the  amount  of  truth.3  He 
even  advised  the  use  of  holy  water  and  the  saying  of  masses  on  the 
ground  that  their  stupefying  effect  would  make  belief  easy.4  From 
this  to  scepticism  the  step  is  short.  Indeed  Pascal  recommended 
Pyrrhonism  as  an  antidote  to  rationalistic  doubts  of  Catholic  dogmas.5 

Among  Protestants,  too,  the  double-truth  theory  has  had  quite  a 
history.  Luther  accepted  this  view  from  his  nominalist  masters.  He 
discusses  the  question  whether  a  thing  can  be  false  in  philosophy  and 
true  in  theology,  and  answers  decidedly,  yes.  Of  reason  he  was  accus- 
tomed to  speak  in  the  most  contemptuous  fashion.  He  declares  that 
it  is  not  possible  to  understand  even  the  smallest  article  of  faith  by 
human  reason;  natural  knowledge  is  complete  darkness;  we  should  listen 
to  the  Son  of  God  who  declares,  "This  is  my  body,"  and  trample  reason 
under  our  feet.  We  should  shut  our  eyes  and  believe  what  Christ 
says,  though  no  man  can  understand  how  it  can  be  true.  It  is  small 

1  Ueberweg,  History  of  Philosophy,  I,  464. 
3  History  of  Dogma,  VI,  167. 

3  Penstes,  pp.  21,  etc.;  see  LeVy-Bruhl's  Jacobi,  p.  168. 

4  Pensees,  xi,  i.  s  Ibid.,  xxv,  33. 


60  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

wonder  that  as  the  years  passed,  Luther  became  steadily  narrower  and 
more  obscurantist.1 

Among  the  later  followers  of  Luther  there  were  many  who  held  not 
only  that  theological  truth  might  contradict  natural  reason,  but  that 
even  contradictory  theological  statements  might  both  be  true.2  An 
outstanding  example  of  this  dualism  in  religious  thought,  resulting  from 
'  the  refusal  to  give  philosophy  a  place  in  theology,  is  seen  in  the  case  of 
Daniel  Hoffman.  He  regarded  reason  as  the  greatest  enemy  of  God  and 
the  church,  next  to  the  devil.  He  held  the  double- truth  theory  in  its 
most  exaggerated  form.  Natural  knowledge  of  God,  he  says,  is  false 
truth.  What  is  true  in  philosophy  is  all  false  in  theology.  It  is  philo- 
sophically true  that  the  world  is  eternal;  it  is  theologically  true  that 
the  world  was  created.  If  the  philosopher  teaches  that  there  is  a  God, 
and  that  he  is  good,  this  is  a  lie  in  theology.  If  the  unregenerate  says 
there  is  a  God,  he  lies.3 

Coming  down  to  later  times,  one  finds  almost  as  extreme  a  dualism 
in  the  religious  thinking  of  Hamann  and  Jacobi.  The  former  regarded 
the  mystery  of  things  as  impenetrable  by  abstract  analysis.4  To 
philosophy  religion  is  foolishness,  and  yet  much  that  to  reason  is  incred- 
ible is  nevertheless  true.  Human  philosophy  is  not  in  a  position  to 
grasp  and  to  judge  divine  revelation;5  for  philosophy  is  only  the  exer- 
cise of  reflection  upon  language,  and  language  is  simply  the  sensible 
symbol  of  the  inexpressible  reality  of  the  soul.  The  object  of  religious 
reflection  and  devotion  is  not  God;  it  is  a  purely  verbal  symbol,  person- 
ified by  a  poetic  license.6 

Jacobi  also  regarded  philosophizing  as  simply  deepening  the  mystery 
of  language.  By  his  method  of  safe-guarding  religion  by  turning  from 
reason  to  instinct,  or,  as  he  later  used  the  terms,  from  the  understand- 
ing to  reason  (the  latter  being  interpreted  as  the  faculty  which  makes 
us  believe  in  the  incomprehensible,  even  if  it  contradicts  what  we  com- 
prehend) he  adopted  a  dualistic  position  of  unstable  equilibrium,  ever 
hovering  between  mysticism  and  total  nescience.  The  absolutely 
fatalistic  and  non-personalistic  pantheism  of  Spinoza  is  the  inevitable 

1  J.  Kostlin,  The  Theology  of  Luther  (Eng.  tr.),  II,  267,  216,  264,  195,  265;   Piinjer, 
op.  cit.,  pp.  128,  130;  Schaff,  Creeds  of  Christendom,  I,  259. 

2  Harnack,  op.  cit.,  VI,  236;  Ptinjer,  op.  cit.,  p.  166. 

3  Ptinjer,  op.  cit.,  pp.  180,  184-86. 

4  Levy-Bruhl,  op.  cit.,  p.  46. 

s  Piinjer,  op.  cit.,  pp.  613,  616. 
6  L6vy-Bruhl,  op.  cit.,  pp.  46,  47. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  6 1 

conclusion,  he  claimed,  of  logical  thought;  but  it  is  nevertheless  untrue; 
nothing  that  we  either  affirm  or  deny  of  the  Absolute  has  any  logical 
value.  The  heart  impels  us  to  believe  in  a  supra-natural,  extra- 
mundane,  supra-mundane,  personal  God;  but  we  should  say  nothing  of  his 
metaphysical  attributes;  the  attempt  to  render  God  intelligible  leads 
to  atheism.1  A  personal  God  and  human  freedom  are  inconceivable  but 
true,  and  the  less  one  thinks  about  them,  the  surer  he  is  of  their  truth.2 
Jacobi  could  well  say,  "With  my  heart  I  am  a  Christian;  with  my  head, 
a  pagan."3 

This  double-truth  outcome  of  the  extreme  reaction  against  the 
reflective  and  metaphysical  element  in  theology  was  practically  indis- 
tinguishable in  many  of  its  utterances,  from  complete  scepticism  with 
regard  to  religious  ideas.  This  is  evident  when  the  positions  of  these 
theologians  and  religious  philosophers  are  compared  with  the  opinions 
of  some  of  their  contemporaries  in  whom  the  philosophical,  rather  than 
the  religious,  interest  was  uppermost.  Thus  Pomponatius  criticized  on 
grounds  of  natural  reason  the  doctrine  of  the  immortality  of  the  soul, 
and  concluded  that  the  question  was  insoluble.  Nevertheless  he  bowed 
to  the  teaching  of  the  church  and  said,  "I  believe  as  a  Christian  what  I 
cannot  believe  as  a  philosopher."4  Francis  Bacon  also,  guided  by  what 
seemed  to  him  the  interests  of  natural  philosophy,  opposed  all  mixture 
of  theology  with  philosophy  as  leading  to  a  fantastic  philosophy  and  a 
heretical  religion5  so  that  some  have  raised  the  question  as  to  whether 
or  not  he  was  sincere  in  his  profession  of  religious  belief.  Hobbes 
also  took  the  position  that  theology  and  the  "doctrine  of  God's  worship" 
should  be  excluded  from  philosophy;  for  the  truths  of  philosophy  are 
capable  of  demonstration,  while  the  dogmas  of  religion  are  to  be  deter- 
mined by  the  sovereign  and  received  with  unquestioning  obedience.6 

'  Ibid.,  pp.  46,  82,  87,  88,  90,  91, 168. 

2  See  Ibid.,  p.  204;  cf.  Piinjer,  op.  tit.,  pp.  640-41.    This  view  of  freedom  reminds 
one  of  Bergson's  treatment  of  the  question:  Les  donnees  immediates,  etc.    (Eng.  tr., 
Time  and  Free  Will],  passim. 

3  Essentially  similar  in  this  regard  to  the  position  of  Hamann  an4  Jacobi,  although 
starting  from  theistic  rather  than  Christian  presuppositions,   was    the  standpoint 
which  had  previously  been  taken  by  Rousseau.    Witness  the  following  expressions 
from  the  " Savoy  pastor":  "Keep  thy  soul  in  such  a  condition  that  thy  wish  is  always 

that  God  exists;  then  wilt  thou  never  doubt  it If  I  say  God  is  such  and  such, 

I  feel  it  and  prove  it  to  myself,  but  I  do  not  therefore  conceive  any  better  how  God 
can  be  so The  worthiest  use  of  reason  is  to  annihilate  itself  before  God." 

4  Piinjer,  op.  cit.,  p.  51;  Hoffding,  History  of  Modern  Philosophy,  I,  15. 
s  Novum  Organum,  pp.  65,  89. 

6  Elements  of  Philosophy,  Pt.  I,  chap,  i,  p.  8;  Leviathan,  chap,  xxxi.,  etc. 


62  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

Here  we  see  the  principle  of  external  religious  authority  used  by  this 
materialist  philosopher  in  such  a  way  as  amounts  to  practical  scepticism 
in  religion.  Descartes  too  made  use  of  the  idea  of  a  double  realm  of 
truth  in  a  way  that  not  only  suggests  religious  scepticism,  but  raises  the 
question  as  to  the  ethical  quality  of  his  motive.  Although  he  committed 
himself  to  the  principle  of  doubting  all  that  could  be  doubted,  in  order 
that  he  might  have  certain  knowledge  to  rest  upon,  he  nevertheless  said 
that  as  the  revealed  truths  of  theology  lay  beyond  the  reach  of  human 
intelligence,  he  did  not  presume  to  submit  them  to  the  feebleness  of  his 
reasonings.  Moreover  he  submitted  the  "clear  and  distinct"  conclu- 
sions of  his  Meditations  to  the  ecclesiastical  authority  of  the  doctors  of 
the  theological  faculty  of  Paris.1  One  wonders  whether  he  had  in  mind 
the  fate  of  Bruno  and  Galileo. 

Pierre  Bayle  is  interesting  in  this  connection.  His  works  contain 
a  defense  of  the  view  that  religious  dogmas  are  true,  although  contrary 
to  reason.  The  philosophical  world  is  even  yet  divided  as  to  whether 
he  was  a  sincere  believer  or  a  clever  sceptic.  Erdmann,  Windelband, 
Hoffding,  and  Falckenberg  with  varying  degrees  of  assurance  maintain 
that  he  was  sincere.  Lange,  Zeller,  Ueberweg,  Piinjer,  and  many  others 
have  asserted  the  contrary.2  Theology  and  philosophy,  according  to 
Bayle,  are  contrary  to  each  other.  To  show  this  he  put  down  seven 
theological  propositions,  and  set  over  against  them  nineteen  proposi- 
tions of  philosophy.  One  must  choose,  he  said,  between  natural  reason 
and  supernatural  revelation;  he  cannot  follow  both.  In  religion  one 
should  not  reason,  but  simply  believe.  Manichaeism  was  more  reason- 
able than  Christianity,  but  this  is  no  disadvantage  to  the  latter.  The 
more  opposed  to  reason  the  dogma  is,  the  more  glorious  and  meritorious 
is  the  faith  that  believes  it.  It  is  true,  as  Piinjer  has  said,3  that  Bayle 
seemed  to  be  interested  in  showing  all  that  could  be  said  against  a  dogma; 
but  yet,  as  Erdmann  reminds  us,4  he  rejected  the  arrogance  which  would 
doubt  the  honesty  of  the  man  who  asserted  that  he  believed  what  was 
contrary  to  reason.  The  one  thing  that  is  certain — and  it  is,  although 
not  surprising,  the  point  of  importance — is  that  Bayle's  works  were 
powerfully  influential  in  turning  the  views  of  the  religious  world  gener- 
ally, and  of  France  in  particular,  in  the  direction  of  religious  scepticism.5 

1  (Euvres  (Paris,  1824),  I,  129,  221-22. 

3  See  History  of  Philosophy,  in  locis. 

3  Op.  tit.,  p.  451. 

4  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  277,  5. 

s  Windelband,  History  of  Philosophy  (Eng.  tr.),  p.  439. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  63 

Henry  Dodwell  may  also  be  mentioned  here.  In  his  book,  Chris- 
tianity not  Founded  on  Argument  (1742),  he  claimed  that  the  arguments 
by  which  religious  ideas  are  defended  do  not  produce  certainty,  and 
would  never  give  rise  to  the  martyr's  zeal.  All  religion  has  depended 
for  its  certainty  upon  authority,  and  must  ever  so  depend.  For  this 
authority  to  remain  effective  there  would  have  to  be  a  constant  particu- 
lar supernatural  revelation  to  each  individual.1  Some  regarded  Dod- 
well as  a  sincere  believer,  but  in  reality  his  book  was  a  clever  attack 
upon  rational  supernaturalism.  It  is  worthy  of  note  that,  in  the  par- 
ticular positions  taken,  it  closely  approximated  the  views  of  his  prede- 
cessor, William  Law,  who,  to  defend  Christianity,  claimed  that  the 
intellect  cannot  comprehend  the  mysteries  of  faith,  and  that  in  such 
high  matters  reason  is  helpless,  save  to  receive  what  God  reveals.2  Thus 
what  Law  made  subservient  to  obscurantism,  Dodwell  turned  into  an 
instrument  of  scepticism.  Entirely  similar  was  the  use  frequently  made 
of  the  arguments  set  forth  by  Butler  in  his  Analogy.  He  aimed  to 
show  that  the  Deist,  who  denied  revealed  religion  because  of  certain 
intellectual  difficulties,  might  with  equal  reason  doubt  his  own  natural 
religion,  for  it  had  its  difficulties  too.3  The  result  was  that  many  were 
led,  not  back  to  an  acceptance  of  Christian  revelation,  but  on  to  a 
rejection  of  all  natural  religion.  In  this  connection  Sir  Leslie  Stephen 
says:  " Depreciation  of  reason  leads  more  naturally  to  universal  scep- 
ticism than  to  implicit  faith.  "4  For  one  John  Henry  Newman  there 
are  a  hundred  David  Humes. 

In  Hume  we  see  caricatured  the  implicit  scepticism  of  "implicit 
faith."  After  arguing  to  show  the  unreasonableness  of  the  belief  in 
the  immortality  of  the  soul,  and  concluding  that  there  will  never  be 
found  any  good  reason  whatever  for  the  belief,  unless  we  get  a  new  logic 
and  new  faculties  of  mind  to  comprehend  it,  he  goes  on  to  say  that  this 
only  shows  our  infinite  obligations  to  divine  revelation,  for  by  no  other 
medium  than  revelation  could  this  great  and  important  truth  be  ascer- 
tained.5 The  oft-quoted  conclusion  of  his  famous  Essay  on  Miracles 
is  in  entirely  similar  vein.6 

Thus  we  see  that  so  closely  may  the  intellectual  expressions  of  reason- 
defying  credulity  and  mocking  scepticism  approximate  each  other  as 

1  Pp.  30,  no,  etc.  2  Works,  II,  7-36. 

3  The  Analogy  of  Religion,  etc.,  Introduction. 

4  History  of  English  Thought  in  the  Eighteenth  Century,  I,  162. 
s  Hume's  Essays,  edited  by  Green  and  Grose,  II,  406. 

6  Ibid.,  p.  108. 


64  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

to  be  almost  indistinguishable.  This  is  because  a  "faith"  afraid  of 
reason  is  already  on  the  way  to  unbelief. 

14.  The  epistemological  dualism  which  we  have  found  involved  in 
the  rejection  of  metaphysics,  where  this  rejection  is  not  at  the  same 
time  an  abandonment  of  the  distinctly  religious  interest,  takes  on  a  new 
form  of  expression  in  Kant's  distinction  between  the  pure,  or  theoretical, 
and  the  practical  reason. 

In  Comte's  positivism  we  have  a  more  radical  parallel  movement 
in  which  the  dualistic  feature  is  kept  in  the  background,  if  not  entirely 
eliminated,  through  the  substitution  of  the  social  for  the  distinctly 
religious  interest.  But  in  Benjamin  Kidd  there  is  a  curious  bifurcation 
of  positivistic  thought  into  a  dualism  of  the  theoretically  true  and  the 
practically  true  or  expedient.  It  amounts  almost  to  a  reversion  to  the 
old  double  standard  of  truth.  Recognizing  that  human  evolution  in 
its  higher  phases  requires  altruistic  action  on  the  part  of  the  masses, 
and  holding  that  only  the  sanctions  of  an  externally  authorized  religion 
will  enforce  such  altruistic  action — externally  authorized,  perforce, 
because  religion  itself  is  irrational — he  advocates  authoritative,  dog- 
matic religious  instruction  as  a  social  necessity.1  On  the  one  hand, 
rationality  and  disaster;  on  the  other,  irrationality  and  progress.  It 
is  a  position  unjustifiable  on  any  ground.  Socially  it  would  prove 
divisive,  setting  intellectual  and  proletarian  against  each  other  in  irrec- 
oncilable antagonism.  Ethically  it  would  mean  doing  evil  that  good 
might  come.  Epistemologically  it  could  be  defended  only  by  the  worst 
type  of  pseudo-pragmatism,  according  to  which  that  is  to  be  held  true 
for  the  other  man  which  it  suits  my  purposes  to  have  him  believe. 

But  coming  to  Kant,  with  whom  the  higher  spiritual  values  were 
an  end  in  themselves,  we  find  an  unresolved  dualism  of  the  theoretical 
and  the  practical,  owing  to  his  having  given  up  the  problems  of  ontologi- 
cal  metaphysics.  Thus  the  ideas  affirmed  as  the  necessary  postulates 
of  the  practical  reason,  which  postulates  are  to  be  controlling  in  the  life, 
are  not  to  be  regarded  as  having  theoretical  validity,  as  giving  knowledge 
of  reality;  moreover,  the  philosophical  concepts  of  the  self  as  the  unity 
of  consciousness  and  of  the  Absolute  as  the  unifying  principle  of  all 
reality  are  to  be  regarded  merely  as  ideas  whose  theoretical  value 
lies  in  the  ordering  of  experience;  they  are  not  transcripts  of  reality. 
Thus  the  theoretically  necessary  is  practically  defective,  or  even 
unusable,  while  the  ethically  essential  is  theoretically  indefensible. 
God,  the  Kingdom  of  God,  and  immortality  are  "ideas  made  by  our- 
selves with  a  practical  purpose,  which  must  not  be  given  theoretical 

1  Social  Evolution,  passim. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  65 

value."1  Kant  regards  himself  as  having  performed  a  service  for  theology 
by  making  it  independent  of  the  judgments  of  dogmatic  speculation, 
thereby  assuring  it  completely  against  the  attacks  of  all  philosophical 
opponents;2  but  a  theology  which  requires  to  be  shielded  from  trying 
conclusions  with  other  theories  of  reality  is  one  that  comes  under 
suspicion  by  that  very  necessity. 

This  Kantian  dualism  proved  stimulating  to  thought  and  provoked 
two  contrary  developments.  In  the  effort  to  transcend  the  dualism 
the  conservatives  made  use  of  the  idea  of  revelation;  the  liberals,  of 
evolution.  Hamilton  and  Mansel  reduced  Kant's  "theoretical"  and 
"practical"  to  the  old  "natural"  and  "revealed,"  respectively,  the 
latter  being  higher  than  the  former  in  value  as  well  as  in  origin.  Hegel 
and  his  followers  chose  to  regard  Kant's  theoretical  and  practical 
knowledge  as  referring  to  adequate  philosophical  and  inadequate  repre- 
sentative or  popular  knowledge,  respectively,  the  former  being  a  higher 
stage  in  the  evolution  of  thought  than  the  latter.  But  in  the  end  neither 
of  these  developments  proved  satisfactory  from  the  standpoint  of  religion. 

According  to  Hamilton  and  Mansel,  Reality,  or  the  Unconditioned, 
is  inaccessible  to  knowledge;  because  to  think  is  to  condition,  and  to 
condition  the  unconditioned  is  not  to  know  it  as  unconditioned.  It  is 
like  the  magic  tree  of  the  fairy  story,  upon  which,  whenever  a  chip 
was  chopped  off,  two  more  immediately  grew  in  its  place;  so,  to  reach 
the  Absolute  by  thought  is  impossible,  for  every  step  takes  one  farther 
away.  Affirmations  and  denials  are  equally  unavailing;  reality  is  incon- 
ceivable. The  door  is  then  left  open  to  faith  in  a  divine  revelation, 
and  nothing  that  faith  affirms  can  be  denied  by  reason,  because  reason 
is  incompetent  in  the  realm  of  revelation,  with  which  faith  deals.  Mansel 
especially  delighted  in  showing  that  faith  involves  believing  the  incon- 
ceivable; such  as  that  the  Absolute  is  a  person,  and  that  penal  substi- 
tution accords  with  justice  and  everlasting  punishment  with  the  love 
of  God.  But  the  trouble  with  all  this  is  that  faith  is  in  just  as  bad  a 
way  as  knowledge;  revelation  has  no  advantage  over  nature.  Faith, 
to  express  itself,  must  use  ideas,  all  of  which  are  incompetent  to 
express  the  truth  with  regard  to  things  divine.  And  so  Mansel  had  to 
acknowledge  that  theology  is  not  a  true  ontology,  but  only  a  higher 
kind  of  phenomenology.3  Religious  scepticism  was  the  logical  issue. 

1  Hartenstein's  edition  of  Kant's  Works,  IV,  267. 

2  Prolegomena  to  Any  Future  Metaphysic  (Eng.  tr.,  Chicago,  1902),  p.  163. 

3  Metaphysics  (sd  ed.),  p.  383.    In  one  of  its  aspects  Bergson's  anti-conceptualism 
is  the  extension  of  Mansel's  agnosticism  from  the  philosophy  of  religion  to  all  con- 
ceptual knowledge. 


66  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

This  was  the  conclusion  drawn  by  Herbert  Spencer  and  many  others. 
Mansel  had  thought  it  sufficient  to  show  that  what  Christian  faith 
affirmed  of  God  could  not  be  disproved,  because  to  deny  anything  of 
God  was  to  condition  the  unconditioned.  But  Spencer  emphasized 
the  opposite  side,  showing  that  the  affirmations  of  faith  similarly 
undertook  to  condition  the  unconditioned.  Hence  religion  became 
mere  silent  adoration  of  the  Unknowable;  and,  as  has  often  been 
shown,  even  that  is  more  than  can  be  logically  defended  from  the 
premises. 

Balfour's  thought  is  essentially  an  attempt  to  return  to  the  Hamil- 
tonian  position.  He  claims  that  neither  the  ultimate  conceptions  of 
science  nor  those  of  religion  can  claim  philosophical  probability;  not 
reasoning  chiefly,  but  the  necessities  of  life,  together  with  the  pressure 
of  social  authority,  explain  our  beliefs  in  both  realms.1  Here  the  posi- 
tion is  that  of  a  revolt  from  naturalism,  issuing  in  scepticism,  combined 
with  a  certain  obscurantist  anticipation  of  pragmatism. 

Hegel  sought  to  overcome  the  Kantian  agnosticism  by  extending 
theoretical  knowledge  over  the  whole  field  of  reality,  leaving  to  the 
so-called  practical  the  function  of  anticipating  the  speculative  or  truly 
philosophical  interpretation  of  reality.  This  lower  kind  of  knowledge 
sets  forth  in  the  language  of  the  imagination,  drawing  its  symbols  from 
sense-experience,  what  may  by  courtesy  be  called  representative  knowl- 
edge. To  this  lower  kind  of  knowledge  belong  the  ideas  of  religion, 
even  when  systematized  in  dogmatic  theology.  The  Hegelians  of  the 
Right  regarded  this  as  a  vindication  of  positive  Christianity  and  ortho- 
dox theology,  so  that  the  Hegelian  philosophy  was  to  them  simply 
apologetics;  but  those  of  the  Left,  as  Strauss,2  interpreting  Hegelian 
idealism  pantheistically  and  in  a  Way  that  amounted,  practically  speak- 
ing, to  materialism,  separated  the  philosophical  from  the  representative 
so  widely  that  almost  no  value  at  all  was  attached  to  the  latter. 

Feuerbach  carried  the  transition  a  step  farther  in  the  positivistic 
direction  by  substituting  for  speculative  philosophy  under  the  category 
of  valid  knowledge  a  religious  anthropology  in  which  religious  ideas 
have  a  psychological  interest  simply.  Theology,  then,  in  its  specula- 
tive as  truly  as  in  its  common  "representative"  form,  becomes  a  mere 
mass  of  childish  illusions,  from  whose  injurious  influence  men  would  be 
freed  by  a  true  knowledge  of  human  nature.  Then  they  would  see 

1 A  Defense  of  Philosophic  Doubt,  pp.  322-25;   Foundations  of  Belief  (8th  ed.) 
pp.  382,  384;    cf.  also  Percy  Gardner,  Exploratio  Evangelica,  chaps,  iv-vi. 
2  Der  alte  und  der  neue  Glaube. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  67 

that  all  our  gods  are  mere  creations  of  our  wishes.  The  only  place 
left  for  theology  then  is  as  a  branch  of  anthropology.1 

F.  A.  Lange  differed  from  Feuerbach  in  his  disposal  of  religious 
knowledge  chiefly  in  regarding  its  ideas  not  as  injurious  but  as  useful 
illusions.2  They  belong  to  the  realm  of  poetry,  and  by  means  of  them 
man  is  lifted  above  the  sorrows  of  the  earth  and  transported  into  an 
ideal  dream-world.3  He  admits  a  double  sense  of  the  word  truth,  but 
when  applied  to  religious  ideas  the  word  is  used  figuratively  only.  In 
science  we  have  fragments  of  truth;  in  the  ideas  of  philosophy  and 
religion  we  have  &  figure  of  truth.  "We  ought  to  have  and  may  have 
a  theory  of  the  world  (or  religion),  but  we  must  not  believe  in  it  theoreti- 
cally; we  must  only  allow  ourselves  to  be  practically,  aesthetically, 
ethically  influenced  by  it.  "4  But  as  has  often  been  pointed  out,  if  the 
illusion  is  recognized  as  illusion,  the  illusion  ipso  facto  ceases,5  and  with 
it  its  influence,  whether  injurious  or  otherwise. 

Thus  we  see  that  the  final  outcome  of  the  Kantian  dualism  of  the 
theoretical  and  practical  was  decidedly  unfavorable  to  religious  knowl- 
edge. On  the  one  hand,  the  attempt  by  means  of  the  Kantian  distinction 
to  shield  religious  knowledge  from  criticism  led  to  the  total  loss  of  the 
content  intended  to  be  conserved.  On  the  other  hand,  the  measure  of 
patronizing  recognition  accorded  to  religious  ideas  as  constituting  an  in- 
ferior kind  of  knowledge,  was  followed  shortly  by  their  total  repudiation  so 
far  as  knowledge- value  was  concerned. 

Parallel  with  the  Hegelian  development,  but  differing  for  our  present 
purpose  chiefly  in  that  its  essential  interest  was  in  the  religious  knowl- 
edge, rather  than  the  philosophical,  was  that  in  which  Schleiermacher 
was  the  central  figure.  He  forms  the  connecting  link  between  Kantian- 
ism and  Ritschlianism,  and  between  himself  and  Kant,  the  chief  transi- 
tional figure  was  that  of  De  Wette.  He  in  turn  was  powerfully  influenced 
by  Fries,  who  had  held  that  the  ideas  of  religion  are  simply  figures  of 
speech,  valuable  for  feeling  but  not  for  science.  According  to  De  Wette 
dogma  and  science  have  nothing  to  do  with  each  other,  and  the  two 
must  be  kept  entirely  separate.  The  religious  sentiment  he  regarded 
as  purely  aesthetic.  Religious  doctrines  are  mere  symbols  which 
express  the  ideals  of  religious  feeling  and  imagination,  but  they  have, 

1  Cf.  G.  B.  Foster,  The  Function  of  Religion,  etc.,  pp.  89  ff. 

2  Geschichte  des  Materialismus,  II,  61  ff.,  540  ff. 

3  Ibid.  (Eng.  tr.),  II,  281-82. 

4  Stahlin,  in  Kant,  Lotze,  and  Ritschl  (Eng.  tr.),  p.  106. 

5  Ibid.,  p.  199. 


68  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

properly  speaking,  no  knowledge-value;  they  do  not  lead  one  to  the 
truth.  What  they  do  is  to  stir,  like  religious  poetry,  the  higher  emo- 
tions and  stimulate  to  worthy  action.1  But  the  question  is  as  to  whether 
religious  ideas  will  continue  to  do  this,  if  they  are  no  longer  thought  of 
as  having  knowledge- value,  and  this  question  De  Wette  apparently 
did  not  sufficiently  consider. 

Schleiermacher  adopted  practically  the  same  position.  He  recog- 
nized the  place  of  speculative  philosophy  but  claimed  that  Christian 
theology  has  an  altogether  different  thing  to  do,  viz.,  to  express  the 
essential  convictions  of  Christian  faith  and  thus  to  serve  as  a  guide  to 
the  Christian  Church.2  The  purely  scientific  endeavor  aims  truly  to 
represent  existence,  and  must,  to  be  complete,  include  propositions  con- 
cerning the  ultimate  reality.  Such  propositions  are  with  difficulty 
distinguished  from  those  which  arise  out  of  reflection  upon  religious 
experiences;  but  the  two  are  very  definitely  distinguished  by  the  entirely 
different  states  of  consciousness  in  which  they  arose.  The  two  must 
be  kept  so  rigidly  apart  that  the  old  question  as  to  whether  the  same 
proposition  can  be  true  in  philosophy  and  false  in  Christian  theology, 
and  vice  versa,  will  arise  no  longer,  because  a  proposition,  inasmuch 
as  it  is  in  the  one,  can  find  no  place  in  the  other.3  The  type  of  phi- 
losophy one  holds  has  nothing  to  do  with  his  theology.' 

Schleiermacher  here  seems  to  have  allowed  the  fact  that  the  scien- 
tific and  philosophical  interests  on  the  one  hand  and  the  religious  interest 
on  the  other  are  psychologically  different,  to  shut  his  eyes  to  the  fact 
that  they  make  assertions  in  large  measure  about  the  same  object; 
religion  has  to  adjust  man  to  a  situation  concerning  which  science  has 
also  something  to  say,  and  the  two  sets  of  judgments  cannot  perma- 
nently be  kept  entirely  apart.  In  philosophy  Schleiermacher  agreed 
with  Jacobi  that  Spinozism  in  its  essentials  was  the  final  system;  but 
what  troubled  Jacobi  was  that  the  difference  between  the  expression 
of  Christian  faith  and  this  pantheism,  or  practical  atheism,  as  he  regarded 
it,  did  not  seem  to  trouble  Schleiermacher  at  all.5  Jacobi  felt  that, 
strongly  as  Spinozism  appealed  to  his  intellect,  as  a  Christian  he  must 
reject  it,  while  Schleiermacher  serenely  accepted  it  and  went  on  his 
Christian  way  rejoicing. 

1  Ueber  Religion  und  Theologie;    Gedanken  uber  den  Geist  der  neueren  protestan- 
tischen  Theologie. 

2  Kurze  Darstellung  des  theol.  Studiums,  §§  i,  5. 

3  Der  christliche  Glaube  (1830),  I,  116,  117.  «  Ibid.,  p.  168. 
s  L6vy-Bruhl,  op.  cit.,  p.  233. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  69 

But  this  dualistic  principle  of  Schleiermacher's  has  received  its 
definitive  criticism  at  the  hands  of  history.  Among  his  followers  were 
theologians  of  very  diverse  points  of  view,  some  very  conservative, 
others  quite  liberal,  each  claiming  that  his  system  was  the  expression 
of  the  Christian  consciousness,  and  that  its  several  doctrines  were  veri- 
fied by  Christian  experience.  Thus  Frank  claimed  that  the  Christian 
experience  of  regeneration  established  for  the  Christian  the  whole  con- 
tent of  orthodox  theology.  By  excusing  Christian  theology  from  the 
necessity  of  coming  to  terms  with  science,  he  failed  to  provide,  as  he 
might  otherwise  have  done,  for  the  criticism  and  reconstruction  of  dog- 
matics in  such  a  way  as  to  insure  its  being  an  expression  of  belief,  not 
only  consonant  with  the  deepest  religious  experience,  but  also  compatible 
with  the  most  advanced  scientific  knowledge. 

15.  The  Ritschlian  school,  with  its  fundamental  distinction  of  judg- 
ments of  existence  and  judgments  of  value,  retained,  along  with  the 
elements  of  greatest  value  in  Schleiermacher's  theology,  some  of  its 
most  characteristic  defects.  Chief  among  these,  perhaps,  was  the 
dualistic  feature  which  has  militated  so  strongly  against  the  most  ade- 
quate form  of  theological  statement,  and,  in  certain  situations  and  for 
certain  minds  at  least,  against  the  highest  degree  of  Christian  certainty. 
To  support  this  view  there  is  in  the  writings  of  Ritschlian  theologians 
a  great  mass  of  evidence,  and  although  with  Ritschl  himself  the  dualism 
did  not  come  to  such  clear  and  defiant  expression  as  in  the  case  of  some 
of  his  followers,  still  it  is  noticeably  present  as  the  presupposition  of 
all  the  work  of  his  maturer  years. 

Ritschl  was  impelled,  as  we  have  seen,  by  the  desire  to  conserve  for 
the  Christian  church  the  values  of  the  evangelical  Protestant  faith. 
He  accordingly  wished  to  avoid  speculation  about  the  nature  of  ultimate 
reality,  as  being  unduly  hazardous  to  faith;  he  would  be  dogmatic  in 
religion,  and  so  escape  the  need  of  having  to  verify  the  utterances  of 
religious  faith  by  bringing  them  into  contact  with  the  scientific  world- 
view  through  the  process  of  philosophical  criticism  and  construction. 
He  found  a  ready  means  of  defending  this  mode  of  procedure  in  a 
distinction  already  familiar  since  the  days  of  Schleiermacher — the  dis- 
tinction between  religious  and  speculative  knowledge.  He  would 
make  his  theology  a  formulation  of  religious  knowledge,  keeping  it  free 
from  the  foreign  elements  of  speculation.  Now  as  a  method  of  getting 
the  hypothesis  to  be  used  in  the  construction  of  a  philosophically  veri- 
fied theology,  this  would  have  been  an  excellent  method  of  procedure, 
and  here  lies  the  strength  of  the  Ritschlian  principle;  but  when  used  as 


70  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

Ritschl  used  it,  as  a  means  of  avoiding  philosophical  verification,  it  was 
dualistic,  divisive,  and  self-defeating.  For  it  is  evident  that  to  avoid 
verification  is  to  leave  objective  validity  insufficiently  guaranteed. 
In  the  presence  of  counter-propositions  of  any  plausibility,  the  dogmatic 
statements  come  into  question;  they  take  their  place  as  mere  hypotheses, 
mere  ideas;  all  becomes  subjective  and  uncertain.  Unless  this  subjec- 
tivism is  relieved,  it  tends  to  express  itself  philosophically  in  either 
critical  idealism  (agnosticism)  or  subjective  idealism — the  two  phi- 
losophies of  doubt. 

We  find  that  of  these  two  evils  Ritschl  chose  both — or  at  best  he 
kept  perpetually  oscillating  between  the  two.  The  question  as  to 
whether  he  was  a  Kantian  or  a  Lotzian  should  probably  be  answered 
by  saying  that  he  was  both  as  well  as  neither,  and  something  more  than 
either.  To  begin  with,  he  took  over  from  Lotze  the  distinction  of  theo- 
retical judgments,  or  judgments  of  fact,  and  worth-judgments,  judg- 
ments of  value.  Science  belonged  to  the  former;  the  faith-judgments 
of  religion,  to  the  latter.  This  distinction  he  then  employed  to 
support  the  Kantian  rejection  of  constructive  ontological  metaphysics. 
He  claimed  that  revelation  may  be  said  to  go  contrary  to  reason  when 
by  reason  is  meant  a  connected  view  of  the  world  which  interprets 
reality  with  instruments  of  knowledge  which  have  no  connection  with 
religion.1  But  this  philosophical  world- view,  in  so  far  as  it  presents 
itself  as  a  unified  view  of  all  reality,  betrays  a  religious  impulse,  which 
departs  from  the  disinterested,  purely  cognitive  methods  to  which  philoso- 
phy ought  properly  to  be  confined.2  In  deference  to  Lotze  the  term  on- 
tology is  retained,  but  it  is  interpreted  in  such  a  way  as  makes  it  simply 
the  analysis  of  the  categories  involved  in  the  cognition  of  a  thing;  that  is, 
it  is  defined  as  meaning  the  metaphysics  which  Kant  would  admit  as 
legitimate,  viz.,  epistemology.3  But  having  used  Lotze's  idea  of  value- 
judgment  to  select  the  content  to  be  excluded  from  metaphysical  treat- 
ment, and  having  used  Kant's  idea  of  admissible  metaphysics  to  obviate 
the  possibility  of  that  content  being  so  treated,  Ritschl  next  proceeded 
to  make  use  of  the  Lotzian  philosophy  to  get  rid  of  the  troublesome 
Kantian  thing-in-itself,  out  of  which  constructive  ontological  meta- 
physics was  so  likely  to  arise.  In  opposition  to  the  common  distinction 
between  the  thing-in-itself  and  its  appearance,  he  maintained  that  the 

1  Justification  and  Reconciliation  (Eng.  tr.),  p.  24. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  207. 

3  Theologie  u.  Metaphysik,  passim. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  71 

thing  is  nothing  more  than  the  appearance,  and  the  so-called  thing-in- 
itself  is  a  mere  abstraction,  the  purely  formal  concept  without  content.1 

But  in  doing  this  he  was  undoing  his  own  system.  He  had  dis- 
tinguished God-for-us,  with  whom  religion,  and  so  the  value-judgments 
of  religion,  and  theology,  have  to  deal,  from  God-in-himself.2  But  if 
the  real  thing  is  the  thing-for-us,  and  the  thing-in-itself  is  a  mere  abstrac- 
tion, so  must  the  only  real  God  be  God-for-us,  and  God-in-himself  a 
mere  abstraction.  But  again,  God-for-us,  unlike  the  thing-for-us,  is 
not  a  percept  but  a  concept;  if  its  appearance  is  its  entire  reality, 
instead  of  God  we  have  but  the  God-idea.  In  other  words,  we  are 
landed  in  subjective  idealism  with  its  implication  that  the  value- 
judgments  of  religion  have  only  subjective  value.  Now  it  may  readily 
be  granted  that  Ritschl  did  not  intend  this,  and  he  did  not  himself 
draw  this  conclusion;  but  this  was  the  conclusion  drawn  from  his 
premises  by  Luthardt,3  Frank,4  Stahlin,5  Pfleiderer,6  and  Pfennigsdorf7 
among  others;  and,  as  Wendland8  and  Ecke9  admit,  he  himself  did  not 
make  himself  clear  on  this  point.  And  if,  as  Haring,10  Traub,11  and  Otto 
Ritschl12  rightly  urge,  it  was  all  the  while  meant  that  the  religious 
value-judgments,  while  subjectively  grounded,  have  objective  validity, 
this  involves,  when  worked  out  with  consistency,  a  return  from  Ritschl's 
version  of  Lotzianism  to  the  Kantian  Ding-an-sich,  and  through  that 
to  some  sort  of  a  realistic  philosophy  which  will  recognize  reality  within 
and  beyond  immediate  human  experience. 

Thus  we  see  how  Ritschl's  effort  to  confine  systematic  theology  to 
dogmatics,  by  excluding  metaphysics  and  interpreting  the  distinction 
between  judgments  of  fact  and  judgments  of  value  as  absolute,  led  him 
into  a  dualism  which  he  sought  to  escape  by  fleeing  from  one  unsatis- 
factory position  to  another. 

I  Ibid.;   cf.  E.  Pfennigsdorf,  Vergleich  der  dogmatischen  Systeme  von  Lipsius   u. 
Ritschl,  p.  10. 

3  G.  Ecke,  Die  theologische  Schule  Albrecht  Ritschls,  etc.,  I,  141. 

3  Zeitschr.  fur  kirchliche  Wissenschaft  und  kirchliches  Leben  (1881),  p.  621. 

4  Gesch.  u.  Krit.  der  neueren  TheoL,  p.  326. 
sKant,  Lotze  and  Ritschl,  p.  222. 
6Jahrbuchfiirprot.  Th.  (1889),  pp.  186-88. 
?0p.  cit.,  p.  12. 

8  Albrecht  Ritschl  u.  seine  Schiller,  p.  51. 

'  Op.  cit.,  I,  143. 

10  Die  TheoL  u.  der  Vorwurf  der  doppelten  Wahrheit,  p.  27. 

II  Zeitschr.  fiir  Th.  u.  Kirche  (1894),  p.  in. 

"  Theologische  Litteraturzeitung  (1893),  S.  645. 


72  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS   IN  THEOLOGY 

Herrmann,  however,  stood  his  ground.  His  standpoint,  perhaps, 
best  illustrates  the  fact  that  even  apart  from  shifts  in  philosophical 
position,  there  is  in  the  making  absolute  of  the  distinction  between 
value-judgments  and  theoretical  or  existential  judgments  a  dualism  which 
is  not  in  the  interests  of  a  sane  and  assured  religiousness.  According 
to  Herrmann  there  is  in  the  nature  of  the  case  an  unbridged  gulf 
between  the  ideas  of  metaphysics  and  those  of  religion.1  The  only 
proper  point  of  contact  between  philosophy  and  religion  is  in  the 
process  of  distinguishing  their  fields  and  excluding  them  each  from 
the  other.2  All  attempts  at  mediation  must  be  renounced.3  It  is  a 
matter  of  utter  indifference  to  the  theologian  whether  philosophy  be 
idealistic  or  materialistic,  whether  it  be  deistic,  pantheistic,  theistic, 
or  whatever  it  may  be.4  It  is  quite  true  and  proper  that  where  dogmatic 
theology  reigns,  inquiry  ceases.5 

The  subjectivism  to  which  this  extreme  dualism  gave  rise  is  mani- 
fest throughout  Herrmann's  work.  Religion,  he  admits,  does  not  deal 
with  universally  valid  truths.6  The  world  of  religion  is  real  for  persons 
only  in  so  far  as  they  feel  and  will  it  to  be  so.7  He  claims  that  if  the 
dualism,  which  he  admits,  could  be  avoided,  it  would  be  of  advantage 
only  to  a  wordly,  grasping  church.8  The  more  fully  a  philosophical 
God-idea  explains  the  phenomenal  world,  the  less  is  it  suited  to  satisfy 
the  demands  of  the  heart  and  life  for  a  Being  who  transcends  phenomenal 
reality.9  So  Herrmann  would  be  compelled  to  assert  in  effect  that  to 
know  the  world  as  it  really  is,  scientifically  and  metaphysically,  is  not 
a  help  but  a  hindrance  to  a  true  and  moral  and  religious  adjustment 
to  the  world,  thus  denying  the  primary  function  of  knowledge;  or  else 
to  admit  that  religion  is  after  all  an  illusion  It  is  small  wonder  that 
Herrmann's  paradoxical  position  provoked  the  charge  of  repeating  the 
old  dualism  of  the  head  and  the  heart,10  and  that  one  critic  went  so  far 

*Die  Metaphysik  in  der  Theologie  (1876),  p.  18. 

2  Die  Religion  im  Verhaltnis  zum  Welterkennen  und  zur  Sittlichkeit  (1879),  Vor- 
wort,  p.  ix. 

3  Communion  with  God  (Putnam),  p.  354. 

4  Die  Metaphysik,  p.  17;  Die  Religion,  p.  in,  etc.;  see  Pfleiderer,  Philosophy  of 
Religion ,  II,  190. 

s  Faith  and  Morals  (Eng.  tr.),  p.  10. 

6  Zeitschr.fur  Th.  u.  Kirche  (1906),  p.  233. 

7  Die  Religion,  etc.,  p.  66. 

8  Communion,  etc.,  p.  354.  9  Die  Religion,  p.  127. 
10  Wegener,  Jahrbuchfur  prot.  Th.  (1884),  p.  226. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  73 

as  to  say  that  no  metaphysics  in  theology  means  no  religion.1  When 
metaphysics  is  the  particular  instrument  which  religion  needs  in  order 
satisfactorily  to  conserve  its  values,  to  be  debarred  from  seeking  meta- 
physical satisfaction  might  prove  religiously  disastrous. 

In  the  opening  pages  of  Kaftan's  Truth  of  the  Christian  Religion  we 
meet  with  statements  which  seem  to  promise  an  avoidance  of  this  dual- 
istic  subjectivism.  He  says  that  the  believer  may  require  proof  in  that 
he  may  want  to  be  assured  that  the  Christian  truth  recognized  by  him 
in  faith  is  consistent  with  what  he  recognizes  elsewhere  as  truth.  Like 
all  real  proof,  this  must  consist  in  considerations  which  exist  for  every- 
one; the  proof  must  be  scientific,  that  is,  objective,  without  regard 
to  will  or  judgments  of  value.  And  finally  such  a  proof  is  possible.2 

But  when  the  question  comes  to  be  asked  how  such  a  proof  is  possible, 
we  are  informed  that  it  must  not  be  by  pointing  out  the  connection 
of  the  reality  presented  to  faith  with  the  reality  otherwise  discoverable; 
it  must  not  be  by  a  fusion  of  apologetics  and  dogmatics.  We  must  not 
attempt  a  proof  of  the  truth  of  the  objects  of  the  Christian  faith,  but 
of  the  truth  of  the  faith  itself.3  It  must  be  shown  that  the  question  of 
a  world-view  is  not  a  matter  of  objective,  theoretical  knowledge  at  all, 
but  of  practical  faith;  that  the  Christian  idea  of  the  Kingdom  of  God 
fulfils  the  requirements  of  such  a  faith,  enabling  man  to  realize  in  prac- 
tice the  highest  ethical  idealism;  that  finally  it  is  reasonable  to  regard 
this  Christian  faith  as  being  based  upon  a  divine  revelation  in  history, 
because  only  thus  does  the  history  of  the  race  come  to  have  unity  and 
meaning.4  This  historical,  practical  proof  is.  the  sole  and  sufficient 
objective  proof  of  the  Christian  faith. 

The  negative  side  of  Kaftan's  theory  of  apologetics  is  fully  elaborated. 
The  idea  that  the  general  truth  of  the  Christian  faith  must  be  made 
good  by  its  content  being  made  an  object  of  scientific  knowledge,  he 
declares  to  be  utterly  groundless.5  Moreover  a  combination  of  the 
results  of  science  and  of  the  content  of  faith  is  today  and  forevermore 
impossible.6  No  direct  employment  of  the  results  of  natural  science 
can  be  made  in  the  construction  of  a  satisfactory  world- view;7  when 
the  attempt  is  made  it  results  either  in  materialism  or  an  intellectual- 
istic  or  voluntaristic  idealism,8  never  in  the  spiritual,  personal  God  of 

'x  Krauss,  ibid.  (1883),  pp.  226  f. 

2  Truth  of  the  Christian  Religion  (Eng.  tr.),  I,  8-10. 

3  Ibid.,  pp.  14-16.  s  Ibid.,  p.  420. 
*  Ibid.,  pp.  19,  385,  426.                          6  Ibid.,  p.  420. 

7  Das  Christentum  und  die  Philosophic,  p.  19.  8  Dogmatik  (3te  AufL),  p.  109. 


74  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

the  Christian  faith.1  The  only  legitimate  constructive  philosophy,  then, 
is  not  the  science  of  the  World-Ground,  but  the  doctrine  of  the  highest 
good,  such  as  Christianity  itself  is.2  The  question  as  to  the  Absolute 
is  the  question  as  to  the  highest  value.3  Any  other  type  of  philosophy 
holds  its  content  as  hypothetical,  subject  to  revision,  and  so  must  be 
kept  forever  separate  from  faith,  which  is  always  inwardly  bound  and 
certain  through  obedience  and  submission  to  divine  revelation.4 

This  keeping  separate  of  faith  and  philosophy  seems,  then,  to  have 
its  ultimate  justification  for  Kaftan  in  the  danger  to  the  content  and 
certainty  of  Christian  belief  that  comes  from  allowing  them  to  act  upon 
each  other.  It  has  its  excuse,  however,  in  the  fact  that,  while  the  Chris- 
tian knowledge  of  God  and  the  scientific  knowledge  of  the  world  are 
both  spiritual  awareness  of  reality,  nevertheless  the  conditions  under 
which  the  knowledge  comes  with  existence  in  the  different  spheres  is 
very  different,  and  so  for  this  reason  it  is  impossible  to  order  the  whole 
knowledge  in  a  unitary  fashion.5  But  in  criticism  of  Kaftan's  position 
here  it  may  be  said  that  the  fact  that  judgments  are  psychologically 
different  in  their  origin  does  not  prevent  their  having  to  do  with  the  same 
or  closely  related  subject-matter;  and  where  this  is  the  case,  unless  the 
judgments  are  brought  into  harmony  with  each  other,  one  or  the  other 
set  of  judgments  is  thrown  under  suspicion.  And  owing  to  the  prestige 
of  science  in  the  modern  mind,  when  religious  judgments  seem  out  of 
harmony  with  the  scientific  world-view,  apart  from  metaphysical 
mediation  both  the  certainty  and  the  content  of  vital  faith  are  imperiled- 

Harnack  does  not  agree  with  the  extreme  statement  of  Sabatier 
that  the  intellectual  element  in  dogma  is  only  the  symbolical  expression 
of  religious  experience;  on  the  contrary,  he  maintains  that  it  has  a 
definite  content  which  reacts  or  ought  to  react  upon  the  religious  experi- 
ence itself.6  Still  he  holds  that  it  is  impossible  to  give  a  rational  account 
of  nature  and  history  from  the  standpoint  of  grace;  the  doctrines  of 
grace  cannot  be  rationally  stated.7  We  are  unable  to  bring  our  scien- 
tific knowledge  and  the  postulates  of  our  inner  life  into  the  unity  of 
a  philosophical  view  of  the  world.8  Christian  doctrine  is  certain  only 
for  faith;9  all  the  efforts  of  speculation  can  produce  no  certainty.10 

1  Das  Christentum,  etc.,  p.  14. 

2  Ibid.,  pp.  5,  26.  &  Dogmatik  (30!  Edition)  p.  109. 

3  Drei  akademische  Reden  (1908),  p.  69.  6  Hist,  of  Dogma  (Eng.  tr.),  I,  22. 

4  Das  Christentum,  etc.,  pp.  25-26.  7  Ibid.,  V,  204. 

8  The  Essence  of  Christianity  (Eng.  tr.),  p.  151. 

9  Hist,  of  Dogma,  VII,  268.  *  I0  Ibid.,  p.  21. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION   OF  THE  REACTION  75 

Now  it  must  be  granted  to  Harnack  that  if  the  speculation  is  an 
attempt,  by  harmonizing  with  known  facts  of  experience,  to  make 
certain  that  which  is  in  whole  or  in  part  unrationalizable,  because  it 
is  contrary  to  experience,  it  cannot  be  done!  Moreover  the  merely 
intellectual  plausibility  of  speculation  can  never  produce  the  vital 
assurance  that  grows  out  of  ethico-religious  experience.  And  yet, 
granted  that  the  content  in  question  does  not  contradict  human  experi- 
ence, and  that  the  religious  and  moral  assurance  does  exist,  it  has  not 
been  proven  that,  through  the  mediation  of  philosophical  criticism 
and  construction,  assistance  may  not  be  given  to  faith  in  the  face  of 
the  objection  that  appearances  are  against  her.  And  indeed,  not  to 
give  this  needed  assistance  is  to  that  extent  to  impair  the  certainty  and 
to  imperil  the  content  of  faith. 

Schultz  finds  a  modicum  of  truth  in  Tertullian's  credo  quid  absurdum* 
Argument  and  analysis  do  not  constitute  the  way  of  making  evident 
the  truths  of  religion.2  The  theoretic  results  of  reason  are  not  proper 
standards  by  which  to  measure  the  truth  of  religious  conviction.3  Theo- 
retic knowledge  has  no  right  to  go  beyond  the  causal  connection  of 
individual  things  in  the  empirical  world.4  In  the  sphere  of  knowledge 
doubt  is  a  conscientious  duty;  in  the  realm  of  religion  it  is  a  moral 
defect.5  That  this  approximates  dangerously  near  to  obscurantism 
must  be  very  evident.  If  religious  doctrines  are  ever  properly  to  be 
reconstructed  at  all,  it  must  be  in  situations  where  religious  doubt  is  a 
"conscientious  duty."  Moreover,  how  can  we  be  quite  sure,  as  Schultz 
claims,  that  the  work  of  the  man  Christ  Jesus  "has  for  us  a  truly  divine 
value,"  unless  God  was  in  Christ,  willing  his  volitions,  and  reconciling 
the  world  unto  himself?  And  to  attempt  to  clear  up  this  conception 
is  to  enter  the  field  of  constructive  metaphysics. 

In  Otto  Ritschl's  statement  of  Ritschlianism  its  objectionable  features 
are  reduced  perhaps  to  a  minimum,  and  yet  it  is  a  question  whether 
he  really  escapes  the  "dualism"  which  he  disowns.  He  says  the  Chris- 
tian world-view  and  science  exist  side  by  side  without  interfering, 
because  science  is  limited  in  its  sphere  to  nature  and  history,  and  for  the 
Christian  the  only  world-view  is  his  faith.6  But  it  may  be  asked,  does 
not  Christian  faith  make  assertions  concerning  things,  persons,  and  events 
with  which  the  natural  and  historical  sciences  deal?  And  do  not  the 
results  of  the  sciences  of  nature  and  history  have  any  bearing  upon  one's 

1  Outlines  of  Christian  Apologetics  (Eng.  tr.),  p.  92. 

2  Ibid.,  pp.  i,  82.          3  ibid.,  p.  2.          4  Ibid.,  p.  83.          s  Ibid.,  pp.  89,  90. 
6  Ueber  Werturteile,  pp.  33,  34. 


76  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

general  world- view  ?  And  does  not  the  prohibition  of  the  attempt  to 
harmonize  our  scientific  and  religious  beliefs  about  the  world  we  live 
in  tend  to  produce  religious  uncertainty  and  finally  loss  of  essential 
Christian  truth  ? 

Reischle,  while  claiming  that  as  Christians  we  have  in  the  "  thymetic  " 
judgments  of  faith  a  knowledge  of  the  depths  of  God,  nevertheless  says 
that  we  do  not  know  God  as  the  Cause  of  the  World,1  and  that  when  we 
speak  of  him  as  personal,  it  must  not  be  supposed  that  we  know  the 
form  of  the  divine  existence  or  intend  a  theistic  explanation  of  the 
world.2  We  can  never  unite  in  an  adequate  idea  of  God  the  thoughts 
of  transcendence  and  immanence.3  The  idea  of  a  personal  God  is 
essential  to  hold  together  the  experiences  of  our  dependence  upon  a  power 
which  places  us  within  a  community  of  believers  and  so  leads  to  our 
salvation;  and  yet  the  personality  of  God  cannot  be  vindicated  on 
theoretical  grounds.4  The  only  unification  of  the  thymetic  and  theoreti- 
cal judgments  consists  in  their  being  both  included  within  the  life  of  one 
and  the  same  individual  spirit.5  But  it  may  be  objected  that  the  presence 
of  elements  really  or  apparently  discordant  within  the  life  of  the  same 
person  does  not  obviate,  but  itself  creates,  the  necessity  of  a  process  of 
harmonization.  "A  house  divided  against  itself  cannot  stand." 

This  dualistic  feature  is  a  characteristic  mark  of  Ritschlianism.  We 
find  it  again  in  Traub,  Thikotter,  Kattenbusch,  Rade,  Lobstein,  and  a 
host  of  others.  Thikotter  insists  that  the  Christian  has  to  judge  the 
world  of  religious  faith  to  be  real,  but  points  out,  that  if  one  claims  to 
know  the  substance  of  things,  it  is  hard  to  keep  clear  of  insoluble  cos. 
mological  problems.6  Traub  holds  that  the  reality  with  which  faith 
deals  is  practically  experienceable  but  not  theoretically  knowable;  hence 
theology  is  made  scientific,  not  by  the  attempt  to  accredit  its  content 
in  the  presence  of  secular  knowledge  of  the  world,  but  by  being  limited 
to  the  exposition  of  the  content  of  the  objects  of  faith.7  Kattenbusch 
claims  that  anything  about  God  or  Christ  which  is  not  included  in 
the  propositions  of  Christian  faith,  while  not  necessarily  non-existent, 

1  Erkennen  Wir,  etc.,  pp.  36,  54. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  67.  3  Ibid.,  p.  70.  4  Ibid.,  pp.  67,  71. 
s  Werturteile  und  Glaubensurteile,  pp.  118-20. 

6  Jugend erinnerungen  einer  deutschen  Theologen,  pp.  217,  f.     See  Ecke    (op.  cit., 
PP-  5°>  S1))  who  say3  that  here  Thikotter  represents  the  genuine  Ritschlian  position 
as  against  even  Ritschl  himself. 

7  Zeitschr.  fur  Th.  u.  Kirche  (1894),  p.  Hi;   (1903),  p.  76. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  77 

is  non-existent  for  us;1  he  expresses  doubt  moreover  as  to  whether 
Christianity  will  stand  being  handled  so  scientifically  as  to  have  its 
theology  subjected  to  the  test  of  philosophical  criticism.2  Rade  is 
typically  Ritschlian  in  treating  theology  as  a  religio-historical  discipline 
— simply  that  and  nothing  more — thus  precluding,  as  Wobbermin 
points  out,3  all  consideration  of  the  question  of  its  ultimate  truth. 
Lobstein  regards  religious  knowledge  as  being  inescapably  subjective, 
and  opposes  any  attempt  to  show  by  means  of  intellectual  evidence  that 
it  is  objectively  valid.4 

One  of  the  earliest  and  most  extreme  expressions  of  the  Ritschlian 
dualism,  but  one  which  simply  accentuated  that  particular  element 
in  the  system,  was  what  came  to  be  known  as  Benderism.  Bender,  who 
had  been  a  pupil  of  Ritschl,  and  had  also  been  deeply  influenced  by 
Feuerbach's  doctrine,  made  bold  to  affirm  that  religious  ideas  are  mere 
products  of  phantasy  for  the  ends  of  the  spiritual  life.5  The  contro- 
versy to  which  this  doctrine  gave  rise  showed  that  many  regarded 
Bender's  position  as  representing  the  real  import  of  Ritschlianism,  which 
was  accordingly  interpreted  as  teaching  that  what  is  true  in  one  sphere 
might  be  false  in  another,  and  that  the  value-judgments  are  useful 
illusions.6  This  was,  of  course,  unfair  with  respect  to  what  Ritschlianism 
intended  to  be,  but  it  was  its  defect  that  its  most  prominent  feature  lent 
itself  so  readily  to  this  caricature 

It  is  remarkable  how  closely  the  doctrine  which  had  been  rejected 
when  propounded  by  the  more  or  less  anti-ecclesiastical  Feuerbach 
and  Lange  and  the  "secularized"7  Bender,  is  approximated  by  that 
which  found  such  wide  acceptance  when  set  forth  with  religious  feeling 
and  sympathetic  imagination  by  Sabatier.  Sabatier  says  religious 
knowledge  can  never  pass  out  of  subjectivity.  The  object  of  scientific 
knowledge — not  the  Ding-an-sich,  but  the  phenomenal  thing —  is  always 

1  Theologische  Litteraturzeitung  (1882),  p.  158. 

2  Von  Schleiermacher  zu  Ritschl,  pp.  75,  76. 

3  Theol.  u.  Met.,  p.  59. 

4  Introduction,  etc.,  p.  152. 

s  Bender,  Das  Wesen  der  Religion,  pp.  22,  89,  105.  See  Nippold:  Die  theologische 
Einzelschule,  II,  150-61. 

6  Cf.  Stahlin,  op.  cit.,  pp.  198,  226,  238;   Orr,  The  Ritschlian  Theology,  p.  249; 
Wennagel,  La  logique  des  disciples  de  Ritschl,  etc.,  p.  4;    Luthardt,  Zeitschrift  fur 
kirchliche  Wissenschaft,  etc.,  II,  622-24. 

7  Herrmann   called   Bender   a   "secularized   Kaftan"    (Theologische    Litteratur- 
zeitung  [1886],  IV,  84  ff.;  see  Nippold,  op.  cit.,  p.  159. 


78  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

outside  the  ego;  but  God,  the  object  of  religious  knowledge,  is  immanent 
in  the  subject  himself.  But  religious  knowlege  is  not  only  subjective; 
it  is  merely  symbolical.  It  is  a  mistake  to  believe  that  a  religious 
symbol,  such  as  the  idea  of  God,  represents  God  as  he  really  is;  the  true 
content  of  the  symbol  is  entirely  subjective.  The  entire  content  of 
religious  ideas  is  metaphorical;  when  the  figurative  element  is  elimi- 
nated there  is  nothing  left.1  It  is  easily  seen  that  when  one  holding 
such  a  point  of  view  passes  from  the  religious  to  the  critical  frame  of 
mind,  he  has  no  alternative  but  agnosticism.2  The  criticism  of  sym- 
bolism contained  in  the  papal  encyclical  on  Modernism — although 
somewhat  naively  stated — puts  its  finger  upon  the  weak  spot  in  the 
system  when  it  asks,  "If  all  the  intellectual  elements,  as  they  call  them, 
of  religion  are  pure  symbols,  will  not  the  very  name  of  God  or  of  the 
divine  personality  be  also  a  symbol,  and  if  this  be  admitted,  will  not  the 
personal  God  become  a  matter  of  doubt  and  the  way  be  opened  to 
pantheism  ?"3  Nor  is  it  any  avoidance  of  the  dualism  and  consequent 
doubt  involved  in  such  a  theory  as  Sabatier's,  when  it  is  said  that  the 
two  ways  of  regarding  events,  the  scientific  and  the  religious,  meet  in 
the  personal  life  of  each  believer,  and  that  that  constitutes  their  synthe- 
sis.4 As  well  might  any  felt  contradiction  be  said  to  be  already  over- 
come, by  virtue  of  its  warring  elements  being  experienced  in  one  and 
the  same  personal  life. 

But  still  other  extreme  and  negative  developments  of  this  dualistic 
religious  epistemology  may  be  seen  in  the  progress  of  recent  religio- 
philosophical  thought,  in  which  the  doctrines  of  the  value- judgment 
and  religious  symbolism  are  determining.  Rauwenhoff  held  that  the 
religious  satisfaction  of  human  needs  constitutes  a  practical  ground  for 
the  belief  that  under  the  poetic  form  of  religious  symbolism  we  have  some 
truth,  which  may  be  embodied  in  an  intellectually  worked-out  world- 
view;  and  yet,  on  the  other  hand,  he  denies  that  we  have  any  right  to 
construct  the  idea  of  God  ex  analogia  hominis,  inasmuch  as  that  would 
be  to  transfer  to  the  Infinite  the  attributes  of  the  finite.5  Siebeck  says 
that,  while  we  have  some  speculative  knowledge  of  the  absolute  World- 
Ground,  a  reconciliation  of  religion  and  theoretical  knowledge  is  not 
possible;  they  belong  to  different  sides  of  human  life.6  Hoffding  claims 

1  Outlines,  etc.,  pp.  303-5,  327,  331.     Cf.  the  position  of  the  neo-Friesian  school. 

3  See  infra,  §  16.  3  The  Catholic  Mind  (1907),  p.  393. 

4  M6negoz,  Publications  diver ses  sur  le  fideisme,  p.  155. 

5  Religionsphilosophie,  pp.  427-537. 

6  Lehrbuch  der  Religions philosophic,  pp.  203,  219,  etc. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  79 

that  the  God-idea  has  no  knowledge-value  for  the  explanation  of  the 
world;  it  is  mere  poetry  and  symbolism,  valuable  for  the  religious 
consciousness,  but  without  any  guarantee  of  objective  validity.  When 
objectively  applied,  it  is  the  illegitimate  personification  of  a  highest 
value.  On  the  other  hand  the  ideas  of  personality  and  activity  cannot 
be  applied  to  the  principle  of  unity  underlying  the  systems  of  time,  space 
and  the  causal  series.1  Thus  we  see  that  in  so  far  as  one's  theology,  in 
which  the  religious  interest  was  primary,  resolves  itself  into  a  philosophy 
of  religion,  in  which  the  philosophical  interest  dominates,  any  epis- 
temological  dualism  which  there  may  be  in  the  former  becomes  onto- 
logical  agnosticism  in  the  latter,  and  what  were  the  treasured  symbols 
of  faith  come  to  be  regarded  as  more  or  less  useful  illusions. 

1 6.  Coming  finally  to  pragmatism,  it  remains  to  inquire  into  the 
effect  of  its  rejection  of  metaphysics  upon  the  content  and  certainty  of 
religious  faith.  The  truth  of  judgments  being  tested  by  their  practical 
utility  in  serving  the  interests  of  life,  it  will  be  seen  that  it  is  only  what 
was  to  be  expected  when  pragmatism  appears  in  a  considerable  variety 
of  forms.  When  life  is  interpreted  in  its  lowest  terms,  as  the  physical 
existence  of  the  individual  and  of  the  race,  and  consciousness  in  all  its 
phases  as  having  value  simply  as  a  means  of  so  adjusting  the  organism 
to  its  environment  that  the  life  may  be  prolonged  and  propagated, 
then  we  have  an  animalistic  variety  of  pragmatism.  This  type  accords 
well  not  only  with  the  materialistic  interpretation  of  history  but  with 
the  crassest  utilitarianism  in  epistemology  as  well,2  and  in  it  the  whole 
question  of  the  truth  of  religion  is  exhausted  by  the  investigation  of  its 
function  in  man's  struggle  for  physical  existence.  But  when  there 
has  been  a  "  transvaluation  of  values,"  and  life  is  interpreted  in  its 
highest  terms  as  the  spiritual  development  and  efficiency  of  the  indi- 
vidual and  society;  when,  instead  of  consciousness  being  regarded  as 
mere  means  for  the  promotion  of  the  physical  life,  the  physical  life  is 
regarded  as  simply  or  chiefly  instrumental  in  the  promotion  of  the 
conscious  life  in  its  spiritual  aspects,  then  we  have  instead  of  the  animal- 
istic, a  humanistic  type  of  pragmatism.  Here  the  question  of  truth  is 
the  question  of  the  function  of  judgments  in  promoting  spiritual  rather 
than  merely  physical  interests,  the  distinctly  human  instead  of  the 
purely  animal.  The  chief  question  with  reference  to  religion  then 
comes  to  be  not  that  of  its  function  in  man's  struggle  for  bare  existence, 
but  the  question  of  its  function  in  man's  struggle  for  a  better  existence. 

1  Philosophy  of  Religion  (Eng.  tr.),  pp.  87-95,  199-217,  etc. 

3  See  G.  A.  Tawney,  Journal  of  Philosophy,  I,  337. 


80  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS   IN   THEOLOGY 

This  humanistic  pragmatism  in  turn  varies  according  to  the  interests 
which  are  recognized  as  genuinely  human.  For  example,  there  may  be 
a  positivistic  pragmatism,  in  which  the  distinctly  religious  interest 
is  repudiated,  the  attempt  being  made  to  have  the  social  and  other 
interests  function  in  its  stead.  Or  there  may  be  a  religious  pragmatism 
in  which,  along  with  the  social,  scientific,  aesthetic,  and  moral  interests, 
the  distinctly  religious  interest  is  also  recognized  as  genuinely  human. 
In  this  case,  judgments  essential  to  the  promotion  of  the  highest  type 
of  religious  life  are  equally  true  with  those  discharging  a  similar  function 
for  the  other  interests. 

But  the  pragmatism  might  possibly  vary  also  from  what  we  shall 
call  the  atomistic,  through  the  individualistic  and  socialistic,  to  the 
universalistic  type.  Atomistic  pragmatism  would  recognize  as  true 
whatever  judgment  furthered  the  impulse  or  interest  of  the  passing 
moment.  Or,  more  accurately,  it  would  tend  to  dispense  with  the  idea 
of  "true "altogether,  for  by  this  reckoning  lies  themselves  would  be  true. 
Everything  would  be  what  it  was  experienced  as  at  any  moment — simply 
that  and  nothing  more.  But  atomistic  pragmatism  cannot  long  maintain 
itself.  Man  keeps  his  intellectual  instruments  in  a  mental  tool-chest, 
and  he  often  finds  that  when  he  brings  forth  an  old  implement  it  no 
longer  works  in  the  changed  situation.  "Any  old  thing  that  works" 
is  still  true,  but  any  old  thing  that  does  not  work  is  not  true,  no  matter 
how  sanctified  by  time  it  may  be.  As  an  instrument  it  is  "put  out  of  busi- 
ness" by  a  new  invention.  Thus  the  standard  of  truth  comes  to  be  that 
which  stands  the  test  of  practice  in  a  prolonged  series  of  similar  experi- 
ences of  the  individual.  This  view  may  be  termed  individualistic 
pragmatism;  the  individual  man  is  the  measure  of  all  things,  both  of 
truth  and  of  its  opposite.  A  thing  is  simply  what  the  individual  experi- 
ences it  as.  Metaphysics  is  retired  in  favor  of  individual  psychology, 
and  even  the  physical  sciences  have  to  be  reinterpreted  from  the  psy- 
chological viewpoint.  But  this  is  too  solipsistic  to  be  long  satisfactory. 
The  judgments  we  make  are  social  products,  and  their  truth  must  be 
decided  by  their  experienced  value  to  society.  Individualistic  gives 
place  to  socialistic  pragmatism;  individual  to  social  psychology.  This 
now  is  held  to  obviate  the  necessity  of  any  further  metaphysic  of  the 
transcendent.  A  thing  is  what  it  is  to  the  social  consciousness,  and  that 
exhausts  its  whole  reality.  But,  strictly  interpreted,  this  would  lead 
to  some  curious  results.  For  instance,  in  the  days  of  the  undisputed 
supremacy  of  the  Ptolemaic  astronomy  the  universe  actually  was  geo- 
centric, but  in  the  days  of  Copernicus  it  began  to  change  its  funda- 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  8 1 

mental  constitution,  until  today  it  is  divided  up  into  solar  systems,  each 
of  them  heliocentric.  Again,  the  evolving  world,  antedating  the  appear- 
ance of  conscious  forms  of  life  upon  the  earth,  is  itself,  with  all  the  past, 
a  product  of  the  evolved  social  consciousness.  Thus  society  is  able  to 
do  what  we  used  to  think  God  himself  could  not  do,  viz.,  change  the 
past.  It  is  very  evident  that  this  merely  human  social  transcendence  is 
not  adequate.  Social  psychology  cannot  give  us  the  final  word  as  to 
reality;  there  must  be  a  metaphysic  of  all  reality,  including  that  of 
immediate  individual  and  social  experience,  but  recognizing  the  exist- 
ence of  reality  beyond  all  immediate  human  experience  and  framing 
hypotheses  as  to  the  nature  and  interrelation  of  all.  The  test  of  truth 
being  still  its  vital  function,  this  type  of  thought  might  be  termed 
cosmological  or  universalistic  pragmatism.  Now  the  claim  to  be  made 
here  is  that  pragmatism  must  be  universalistic  and  therefore  meta- 
physical, if  it  is  to  be  distinctively  religious  instead  of  purely  positivistic. 
There  is  a  misinterpretation  of  pragmatic  theory  somewhat  common 
among  novices  in  the  subject,  which  may  be  styled  pseudo-pragmatism. 
This  assumes  that  what  serves  any  human  interest  is  serviceable,  i.e., 
true,  for  every  other  human  interest.  Thus  whatever  is  found  service- 
able for  religion  or  morality  is  assumed  to  be,  without  further  criticism, 
true  for  science,  and  whatever  hypothesis  is  found  serviceable  by  the 
physical  scientist,  for  example,  is  on  that  account  true  in  the  realm  of 
morals  and  religion.  But  experience  soon  shows  this  type  of  pragma- 
tism to  be  untenable.  There  occur  conflicts  between  the  hypotheses  of 
the  sciences  and  the  postulates  of  the  moral  and  religious  consciousness, 
so  keen  that  in  many  cases  those  dominated  by  one  interest  repudiate 
entirely  as  useless  and  even  injurious  (i.e.,  untrue)  the  thought- 
instrument  cherished  by  those  in  whom  some  other  interest  is  upper- 
most. Out  of  pseudo-pragmatism,  then,  there  are  three  possible  avenues 
of  escape  for  one  who  does  not  wish  to  abandon  the  ground  of  prag- 
matism. One  may  do  the  obvious  thing,  viz.,  undertake  to  reconstruct 
all  of  one's  ideas  so  far  as  is  necessary  to  bring  them  into  harmonious 
co-operation  with  each  other  without  impairing  their  efficiency  in  their 
own  departments;  this  would  lead  to  a  religious  type  of  humanistic 
pragmatism,  which,  for  its  working  out,  would  require  to  become  what 
we  have  called  universalistic  and  so  metaphysical.  Or,  one  may  do 
the  desperate  thing  and  repudiate  one  of  the  warring  interests  entirely, 
such  as  the  religious  interest  on  the  one  hand,  or  the  scientific  on  the 
other.  If  the  religious  interest  is  repudiated,  either  explicitly  or  vir- 
tually by  the  substitution  for  it  of  some  other,  as  the  social  interest, 


82  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

and  the  calling  of  it  religious;  then  the  resultant  pragmatism  will  be 
at  best  positivistic;  it  will  the  more  contentedly  try  to  do  with  social 
psychology  instead  of  metaphysics  and  will  be  what  we  have  termed 
socialistic  rather  than  universalistic.  Or,  finally,  one  may  attempt 
the  impossible,  viz.,  to  hold  the  different  life-interests  quite  separate 
from  each  other,  so  that  the  judgments  serviceable  to  each  interest  will 
be  regarded  as  true  for  that  interest  alone,  having  nothing  to  do  with 
those  true  for  other  interests.  This  leads  to  a  dualistic  epistemology, 
or  as  we  may  term  it,  dualistic  pragmatism. 

Now,  strange  as  it  may  appear,  it  is  this  impossible  position,  this 
dualistic  pragmatism,  which  most  out-and-out  pragmatists  attempt  to 
hold.  They  shun  the  obvious  metaphysical  pathway  as  too  old  and 
common-place;  they  shrink  from  the  desperate  course  of  repudiating 
any  fundamental  human  interest  (such  as  the  distinctly  religious),  as 
being  altogether  outre,  at  least  in  the  present  stage  of  the  social  con- 
sciousness. Hence  they  choose  the  middle  ground  of  dualistic  pragma- 
tism, promising  thereby  to  guarantee  sufficiently  the  certainty  and 
content  of  religious  faith. 

But  this  dualistic  pragmatism  is  a  position  of  unstable  equilibrium. 
It  marks  the  determination  to  prolong  indefinitely  a  state  of  distressing 
tension.  Even  if  we  grant  that  Professor  James,  following  Bergson,  is 
to  a  great  extent  justified  in  an  attack  upon  conceptualist  logic,1  yet 
to  abandon  the  search  for  rationality  is  to  give  up  the  effort  to  harmoni- 
ously adjust  the  great  human  life-interests  to  each  other.  No  theoreti- 
cal glorification  of  disharmony  will  keep  men  from  seeking  relief  from 
the  friction  which  arises  from  having  to  use  ideas  to  get  them  out  of 
trouble  in  religion  which  get  them  into  trouble  in  science,  and  others 
to  get  them  out  of  trouble  in  science  which  get  them  into  trouble  in 
religion.  The  result  is  that  those  who  refuse  to  take  the  metaphysical 
way  out  inevitably  tend  to  pass  from  dualistic  pragmatism  to  the  posi- 
tivistic type  combined  with  either  subjectivism  or  agnosticism. 

In  this  transition  one  of  the  intermediate  steps  is  usually  a  doctrine 
of  symbolism,  somewhat  akin  to  that  of  De  Wette,  Sabatier,  and  Hoff- 
ding.  Various  stages  of  the  transition  are  represented  in  the  recent 
literature  of  pragmatism.  Thus  according  to  Dr.  Irving  King  our 
concepts  are  only  functionally  valid  and  do  not  refer  to  ontological  real- 
ities. For  example,  Jesus'  promise  of  the  Holy  Spirit  as  a  comforter 
in  his  place  was  a  practical  concept  to  allay  the  sorrow  of  his  disciples 
over  his  departure,  and  it  was  illogical  to  turn  this  into  a  dogma  and 

1  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  Lectures  V-VIII. 


CONSEQUENCES  TO  RELIGION  OF  THE  REACTION  83 

postulate  as  ontologically  real  what  had  functional  reality  only.  It  is 
an  unavoidable  but  perverse  peculiarity  of  the  movement  of  thought 
to  regard  as  true  ontologically  what  was  only  true  functionally  in  meet- 
ing some  specific  need  of  life,  as  for  example  the  Christian  doctrine  of 
the  Trinity.1  Similarly,  according  to  Dr.  E.  S.  Ames,  the  statement  of 
the  genesis  and  development  of  an  idea  carries  its  own  indication  of  the 
truth  of  the  idea.  Thus  the  idea  of  God,  which  is  the  great  working 
hypothesis  of  religion,  is  true  because  and  in  so  far  as  it  is  of  value  in 
actual  experience;  but  no  one  has  ever  been  able  to  produce  any  ade- 
quate answer  to  the  question,  Is  there  an  actual  objective  reality  cor- 
responding to  the  subjective  idea  of  God,  and  the  question  itself  has 
fallen  under  suspicion.2  Again,  in  the  words  of  Professor  Foster,  "The 
word  God  is  a  symbol  to  designate  the  universe  in  its  ideal-achieving 
capacity.  It  is  the  expression  of  our  appreciation  of  existence,  when 
our  feelings  are  so  excited  as  to  assign  worth  to  existence.  But  all  our 
highest  ideas  are  but  figurative  expressions.  Even  the  concept  of  a 
personal  God  has  symbolic  validity  only,  and  the  function  of  a  symbol 
is  not  to  give  an  exact  report  concerning  the  nature  of  an  object,  but  to 
express  the  appreciations  of  the  subject.  However,  since  personality 
is  our  highest  idea,  it  must  ever  be  on  that  account  the  word  which 
most  fittingly  symbolizes  our  experience  of  the  relation  of  reality  to 
our  ideal  values."  But  "it  would  seem  that  we  are  shut  up  to  ontological 
agnosticism."  "The  correlate  of  faith  is  value  and  not  fact."3  In  these 
quotations  the  essential  points  seem  to  be  that  religious  ideas  are  true 
in  religious  crises  only;  they  should  not  be  regarded  as  true  of  reality 
permanently,  but  they  may  be  regarded  as  symbols  by  means  of  which 
we  poetically  represent  that  which  transcends  knowledge.  If  this  is 
not  to  mean  psychological  positivism  and  religious  agnosticism,  in  which 

1  "The  Pragmatic  Interpretation  of  Christian  Dogma,"  Monist,  XV,  251, 
254-56.  Cf.  The  Development  of  Religion,  passim.  No  more  pertinent  criticism  of  this 
position  can  be  found  than  the  words  of  Professor  G.  B.  Foster,  "Let  any  functional 
psychologist  try  to  act  upon  the  idea  of  God,  no  matter  how  it  arose,  and  at  the  same 
time  disbelieve  in  his  existence;  he  will  find  that  no  action  will  follow,  if  ontological 
reference  be  denied  to  the  idea." — Am.  Journal  of  Theology,  XI,  596. 

a  "Theology  from  the  Standpoint  of  Functional  Psychology,"  Am.  Jour,  of 
TheoL,  X,  228-29,  232;  cf.  The  Psychology  of  Religious  Experience,  passim. 

3  The  Function  of  Religion  in  Man's  Struggle  for  Existence,  pp.  109,  no,  181,  198. 
These  quotations  from  Professor  Foster's  recent  book  might  perhaps  have  been  intro- 
duced with  equal  propriety  at  the  close  of  the  preceding  section,  in  connection  with 
the  reference  to  Sabatier,  Hoffding,  and  other  philosophers  of  religion  who  have  felt 
the  influence  of  Ritschlianism. 


84  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

the  certainty  and  the  content  of  religious  faith  are  both  lost,  it  would 
seem  necessary  to  call  in  all  the  powers  not  only  of  Professor  James' 
''will  to  believe,"  but  of  Dr.  Urban's  "will  to  make-believe"  as  well, 
according  to  which  religion  is  essentially  "the  very  human  assumption 
that  what  is  not  nevertheless  is"1 

But  in  opposition  to  all  this  it  should  be  noted  that  when  ideas  are 
really  functioning  in  life,  the  individual  claims  to  have  valid  knowledge 
of  objective  reality.  When  one  is  eating  he  is  dealing  with  an  objective 
reality,  food,  not  with  sensations  and  ideas.  So  when  one  is  religious 
he  is  dealing,  not  with  the  God-idea,  but  with  God.  He  theologizes, 
ontologizes,  but  does  not  in  that  situation  psychologize.  The  moment 
he  can  no  longer  regard  God  as  Object  to  which  he  adjusts  himself,  that 
moment  the  God-idea  ceases  to  exercise  its  function  in  the  religious  life; 
it  ceases  to  control  his  action.  When  one  has  faith,  he  theologizes;  his 
consciousness  is  ontological  in  its  method  of  procedure. 

But  there  is  the  time  of  subjectivity  in  the  religious  life,  as  in  other 
phases  of  life.  This  comes  when  the  ideas  which  have  functioned 
satisfactorily  no  longer  do  so  completely  in  the  changed  situation. 
Attention  is  immediately  turned  from  the  object  to  the  instrument  of 
adjustment,  viz.,  the  idea.  The  object  has  disintegrated  into  its  ele- 
ments of  existence  and  idea,  both  now  regarded  psychologically  because 
subjectively,  as  sensation  and  hypothesis.  In  the  moment  of  faith  and 
action  we  ontologize;  in  the  moment  of  doubt  we  cease  from  our  imme- 
diately practical  activity  and  psychologize.  The  moment  of  faith  is  the 
ontological  moment;  the  moment  of  doubt  is  the  psychological  moment. 
At  present  in  religion  it  is  the  psychological  moment,  the  moment  of 
uncertainty  and  reconstruction,  and  that  for  two  reasons.  In  the  first 
place,  many  of  the  religious  ideas  of  the  past  do  not  function  satisfac- 
torily in  the  present  situation;  and  secondly,  an  insight  into  the  func- 
tional criterion  of  truth  has  led  many  to  say  that  what  did  function 
serviceably  in  the  past  was  then  true,  but  it  is  now  true  no  longer.  This 
casts  doubt  upon  even  what  is  functioning  satisfactorily  at  present,  for 
it  is  assumed  that  it  too  will  cease  to  function  and  will  be  replaced  by 
something  else.  This  makes  the  subjective  moment  chronic  and  leads 
to  a  scepticism  which  the  pragmatic  interpretation  of  truth  only  thinly 
veils.  It  would  be  better  to  speak  of  degrees  of  truth,  or  of  approxi- 
mation to  truth,  and  to  regard  the  changes  as  from  less  adequate  to 
more  adequate,  from  less  true  to  truer;  in  short,  as  an  evolution,  not  a 
mere  exchange. 

1  International  Journal  of  Ethics,  XIX,  212-13,  23I- 


CONSEQUENCES   TO   RELIGION  OF   THE   REACTION  85 

The  religious  unsatisfactoriness  of  the  recent  attempts  to  apply 
functional  psychology  to  theology  seems  to  be  due  to  the  making  of 
the  subjective  moment,  the  moment  of  doubt,  normative  and  final, 
instead  of  making  it  what  it  is  in  other  departments  of  life,  viz.,  the 
moment  or  stage  of  reconstruction,  and  when  once  the  reconstruction 
is  completed,  going  on  to  use  the  reconstructed  idea  in  the  moment  of 
faith,  of  life,  of  activity,  i.e.,  the  moment  of  theology  and  ontology. 
It  is  a  mistake  to  take  the  moment  of  doubt,  in  which  consciousness 
becomes  subjective,  and  attention  is  turned  upon  the  idea  in  its  psy- 
chological existence,  as  final  and  normative;  it  should  rather  be 
regarded  as  merely  transitional  and  therefore  transient  and  to  be  tran- 
scended. If  the  psychology  of  religion,  instead  of  being  an  aid  in  theo- 
logical reconstruction,  becomes  a  substitute  for  theology,  it  will  be  an 
indication  that  religion  is  dead.  Instead  of  performing  a  much  needed 
operation  upon  the  living  body  of  theology,  it  will  be  shut  up  to  a  dis- 
section of  the  corpse. 

But  theistic  religion  is  not  dead  yet.  Nor  is  it  so  inert  and  ineffec- 
tive a  phenomenon  as  that  its  ideas  function  by  way  of  "self-discharge" 
only.  As  steam  in  the  engine  functions  not  primarily  in  being  dis- 
charged, but  in  driving  the  piston  to  and  fro  in  the  cylinder,  and  so 
moving  the  wheels  of  mechanical  progress,  so  it  is  with  the  function  of 
theistic  religion  and  the  ideas  which  determine  it.  Control,  not  discharge, 
is  the  function  of  primary  importance.  But  that  which  is  merely 
subjective  and  under  suspicion  can  never  be  controlling.  There  is  need 
of  passing  from  the  psychological  to  the  ontological  moment.  A  psy- 
chology of  the  perception  of  our  food  will  not  satisfy  our  hunger,  even  if 
it  should  temporarily  destroy  our  appetite.  Our  food  is  just  as  much' 
(and  just  as  little)  a  mental  construction  as  our  God.  Yet  even  Mrs. 
Eddy  has  said  that  it  would  be  foolish  for  us  yet  to  try  to  do  without 
eating.  Functional  psychologists  should  recognize  that  it  is  foolish 
for  us  yet,  to  say  the  least,  to  try  to  do  without  an  active  response  to  an 
objectively  real,  ontologically  existent  God.  We  might  perhaps  survive 
in  the  struggle  for  existence,  but  we  could  not  succeed  in  the  struggle 
for  a  better  existence  as  we  otherwise  might.  And  doubtless  the  "yet" 
may  be  eliminated  both  with  regard  to  eating  and  to  the  religious  life. 
This  will  mean  then  that  theology,  instead  of  fading  away  into  mere 
psychology  of  religion,  must  boldly  take  up  the  ontological-metaphysical 
task.  Theology  must,  if  religion  is  not  to  suffer  seriously,  under- 
take to  build  into  the  very  fiber  of  its  tissues  a  philosophy  of  reality. 
It  must  pass,  not  into  a  psychological  philosophy  of  religion,  valuable 


86  REACTION  AGAINST  METAPHYSICS  IN  THEOLOGY 

as  that  is,  but  into  an  ontological  philosophy  of  God.  To  resolve  the 
expression  of  faith  into  mere  poesy,  and  then  to  invite  the  distressed 
religious  soul  to  continue  to  utilize  it  as  "useful  illusion"  is  likely  to 
appeal  to  him  as  adding  insult  to  injury.  He  may  play  with  religious 
ideas  under  the  guidance  of  the  aesthetic  interest,  but  he  cannot  work 
with  them  in  the  serious  business  of  life.  But  once  one  has  stepped 
fairly  into  the  field  of  religious  psychology,  there  is  only  one  way  out 
of  this  state  of  subjectivism  and  distressing  doubt,  and  that  opens 
immediately  into  ontology  and  metaphysical  theology. 

Our  conclusion,  then,  is  that  the  reaction  against  metaphysics  in 
theology,  while  originally  intended,  in  the  great  majority  of  cases,  as 
a  means  of  conserving  the  certainty  and  content  of  religious  faith,  and 
while  finding  its  relative  justification  in  the  degree  in  which  it  effects  this 
conservation,  has  necessarily  tended  toward  a  dualistic  religious  episte- 
mology  which  is  a  serious  menace  to  both  the  certainty  and  the  content 
which  the  reaction  was  designed  to  conserve.  When,  through  the 
advances  of  the  various  sciences,  the  objects  of  religion  as  previously 
conceived  are  called  in  question,  readjustment  to  the  total  religious 
situation  through  the  reconstruction  of  religious  ideas  becomes  impera- 
tive at  the  demand  of  both  religion  and  science.  This  will  mean  the 
introduction  of  metaphysical  processes  into  theological  thought.  The 
only  alternative  is  to  leave  religious  ideas  under  suspicion,  and  conse- 
quently the  objects  of  religion  problematic  at  best.  And  ultimately 
this  destruction  of  religious  certainty,  if  uninterrupted,  must  eventuate 
in  the  total  loss  of  the  content  of  religious  faith. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
BERKELEY 

Return  to  desk  from  which  borrowed. 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


DEC    7   1947 

5    -5*48 


LD  21-100m-9,'47(A5702sl6)476 


2. 


Ms 


